


High Five

by Invisible_Stagehand



Category: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Ghosts, Ninjas - Freeform, Other tags to be added, ghostbusting, space travel, unexpected dancing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-11-21 07:45:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 54,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11352987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Invisible_Stagehand/pseuds/Invisible_Stagehand
Summary: Doctor McNinja returned to consciousness vividly aware of three things: he was hurt, he was in a strange place, and he wasn't wearing any pants.  Events in this fanfic would be set between the webcomic stories 'Doc Gets Rad' and 'Army of One.' Some spoilers for all stories before 'Army of One' may occur.





	1. Talking In Your Sleep

Doctor McNinja returned to consciousness vividly aware of three things: he was hurt, he was in a strange place, and he wasn't wearing any pants.

He held himself perfectly motionless, eyes closed, not letting his breathing change. He had a headache. A familiar headache: the sharp stabbing pain of a hangover. But there was more than that, a raw soreness to his scalp that suggested that he might have taken a hit to the head. His back and shoulders were killing him, the pain of multiple blows.

His stomach growled in passing; he ignored it. He was more concerned with whether he was fit to fight or not – and the location of his pants.

His hands felt fine, so did his arms and legs. But he was cold all over, too cold: cold enough that it made his muscles ache. He was shivering, and no matter how he concentrated he couldn't stop shivering. He was lying on something not particularly soft, and a blanket covered his body. Under the blanket, he was stripped down to his briefs; his ninja mask clung damply to his face.

He listened, and heard the storm. A storm heavy with rain, and hard winds lashing though the trees; he could hear tree branches snapping. The storm was outside; inside with him was the crackling of a fire, and another person breathing, somewhere close. He smelled wood smoke and pond water, chemicals and sweat.

He tried to remember how he had gotten here. No luck.

Through his closed eyelids, he could see light flickering on the left-hand side of his mask; he slowly opened his right eyelid just a hair. He saw a ceiling, and an arm hanging down, fingers brushing his chest, from a small red couch at his right side. The hand of a woman or a small man: probably a woman, the nails had (rather badly peeling) clear nail polish on them. The arm and the heavy breathing seemed to be from the same person. And there was a tiny flashlight by his head, standing neatly on end.

He opened his left eye, carefully, because the light was on that side. He saw a glassed-in fireplace with a roaring fire. He was lying on the floor by the fire, on carpeting over what felt like concrete.

His sword! It was beside him with the handle at hip level, the long blade gleaming in the firelight. Beside it were his other weapons, and his cell phone. The sight made him relax, invisibly. Wherever he was, he wasn't a prisoner: no one would leave a prisoner with their weapons. Then he tensed again, because the sword was placed in such a way that he couldn't take it without his motion being visible in the firelight.

His mind calculated the angle that the apparent sleeper must be lying at, and his left hand made a practiced slide towards his sword hilt. He reached it, and paused.

The sword was placed at exactly the right angle for him to reach it – which meant he probably had been the one to place it there. But why? Where was he, why couldn't he remember coming here?

Then he suddenly remembered part of it. If he had not been holding himself still, he would have certainly risen to go find a desk that he could pound his head on. What could have made him think that getting drunk before he challenged his mother to battle was a good idea?

He'd probably been watching too many Drunken Master movies late at night, with the sound off, and had decided to try some drunken ninja-ing. He must have fought Mitzi, and lost. And stumbled out into the storm…there had been a storm. Rain at first, and then suddenly hail: ice clinging to him all over, a heavy weight across his head and shoulders, freezing to him as he stumbled back down the mountain towards his car. The wailing of the wind, and another wailing…

He remembered: BREATHE! a voice screaming in his ear, and shouting back NO! into the smile with too many teeth. He reached for more memories, but that was it: a fragment that made no sense.

He opened both eyes wide now, looking. There was no light in the room except for the fireplace, and he could hear no humming of motors: no furnace, no refrigerator. The storm could mean there was a blackout – or maybe the power had been cut deliberately.

The person above him stirred, and then moved towards him.

Time seemed to slow: attack, or pretend to be unconscious? Both plans had their merits. He was still trying to decide when someone blinked at him from over the side of the couch. A woman, with sweat-lank hair and very, very tired eyes.

He desperately wanted to ask her where his clothes were, but for some reason the first words to come out of his mouth were "Why am I on the floor?"

She tilted her head as though thinking, and finally replied, "Gravity?"

His eyes widened in confusion. She gave a little shrug, and then lay back down where he couldn't see her.

"Wait, why am I on this floor?"

She came back; the firelight showed her frowning. "Because you're too tall for this couch, and I couldn't put you on anyone else's floor." She turned her face away, and muttered "More's the pity…"

"No, wait, what. What am I," he tried to get up and stopped himself, feeling his arms tremble with fatigue. "What am I – doing on – your – floor?"

She groaned and blinked down at him, then stared blearily at her wristwatch. "Well, it's time to check you anyway." Her voice was as tired as her face, but she didn't sound quite American. British?

He tensed. "Check me for what?"

"Concussion side effects. Y'said I should check." Without another word she was suddenly crouched over him, hands and feet on each side of him. She was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, grey and black in the flickering firelight. She was quite vulnerable to any number of strikes from this position – that is, if he didn't feel too weak to lift a hand against her.

"Could you look at the fire, please?"

He let his head turn and she looked at his eyes quickly with a flashlight. "Even contraction, so that's right. What's your name?"

"Doctor McNinja."

"What day is it?"

"Sunday."

"Was. Now it's Monday. What color is Paul Bunyan's ox?"

"It's – blue?"

"Three for three."

"My turn. Who are you, what am I doing here, and how did I get a concussion?"

"You don't remember anything?"

"No."

"You did before. Do you think it's from the concussion?"

"How did I get a concussion?" he said again, getting a little frustrated.

"A tree fell on you."

He raised his chin a fraction, feeling vaguely insulted. "Oh, sure it did. I could dodge a tree…"

She arched one eyebrow at him. "It was dark, and it was a very big tree." She leaned a little closer and then flinched, one hand going to the back of her neck. "Ow."

His medical interest suddenly perked up. "Are you hurt?" There had been cuts and scrapes on her hand, now that he thought of it. Looking closer he could see bruises on her wrist and neck in the firelight, pale red and blue against her skin.

"Just a stiff neck from driving. Think you can sit up?"

Sitting up would let him see where he was, and if there were any other weapons at hand. "Yes."

She stood over him and grabbed him under the armpits, heaving with surprising strength. He clutched the blanket over him as she dragged him up and onto the couch. He leaned back into it, tucking the blanket close up under his chin. He was suddenly, vividly aware that he wasn't wearing anything under the blanket except his briefs, and desperately trying to remember which pair he'd put on this morning. One of the white ones? The grey ones? Please, not the black ones with little yellow Batman logos all over them…

"Do you have any more blankets?" he asked.

She sat down beside him and sighed, shoulders slumping. Then she looked up at him considering. "No. I only had the one."

He looked her over, trying not to be too obvious. The short-cut hair that clung to her high forehead was pale blonde in the firelight, and her eyes were pale too, a light blue that was almost white. Not a face that he remembered, square and intelligent with a slight double chin. She was definitely in very good physical condition, from the way she had lifted him to the couch.

"What's the last thing you remember?" she asked.

"What happened?" he asked back.

"You go first."

"I - look, I need to get back to my office." The idea burned in him: he wasn't safe here, whatever had happened. He didn't have time to stay here and interrogate her. He needed to get back to his base, figure out what had happened to him.

"No, you should stay here and rest."

"Look, I have to-" He started to shrug out of the blanket and then quickly pulled it back over him. "Where are my clothes?"

"No," she said, hands out. "Stop. You said-"

"I need my clothes, now. I have to leave, there might be patients waiting!" He snaked one arm out from under the covers and tried to lever himself to his feet, and she shoved his arm aside and sat on him.

His breath whooshed out in surprise. Not that she was crushing him, but she was a lot closer than he was used to being with people who weren't patients. She was sitting facing him, one knee on each side of his hips, and her face was close enough to his that he could feel her breath on his skin.

"Doctor-"

"Let me go," he said, his voice dropping dangerously. "Now." He put his most Batman-esque growl into that last word, but she didn't even blink.

"Your medical opinion. Hypothermia, what are the symptoms? Severe hypothermia."

He promptly came back with the textbook definition. "Caused by a dangerous drop in core body temperature. Prolonged shivering, confusion, lack of coordination, lassitude…shallow breathing...oh." She was nodding as though checking off a list, and he finally connected his shivering with his wet mask with his weakness.

"All of the above, Doctor. Plus the concussion."

All right, he could work with this. He was a doctor; it was just a coincidence that he was the patient as well. "Okay then, to treat hypothermia you need to remove the patient's wet clothes-"

"Did that."

"Warm them – I mean me - gently."

"Did that too."

"Share – ah, no, supply warm liquids? For dehydration?"

"I only had cold water, and you kept choking. And you skipped the step about 'share body heat.'"

"That's only for very severe hypothermia," he countered weakly.

She rolled her eyes. "Doctor, you were turning blue. All over. Your breathing was irregular, your pulse was weak, you were trying to talk to people who weren't here, yes and fight them too. You needed body heat, you got body heat."

Shared body heat. Keep it that way, he told himself: Don't think snuggled, or cuddled, or anything else. They had shared body heat, and that was it. He wondered where they had - shared. Here on the couch? On the floor? In her bed? "I don't remember anything…bad," he said guardedly.

That earned him a glare. "Thank you. Now, you told me," she poked him gently with one finger, "that you would try to leave as soon as you were awake, and that I had to keep you here, or you'd push yourself too hard and freeze and die out there. So, do you promise to stay if I get off you?"

He looked at her suspiciously.

"Aw, come on! I'll feed you," she grinned, a peculiar closed-mouth grin that didn't show any teeth.

His stomach went from growling to howling in an instant. He was hungry, starved: he had to have food. Food, water. The weakness in his limbs, the dizziness and pain in his head, the burning thirst in his mouth, all would be solved.

But there was food back at his office too…

"I'll stay," he lied.

"Do you swear?"

"I swear," he lied again.

She leaned back and held out one hand in front of his face. Slowly, she curled her fingers down, leaving only her little finger raised.

"Do you pinky-swear?"

He looked at her, horrified. How could she –that was a secret! His secret! What – why would he tell her that?

"Pinky-swear," she sing-songed. "Or else."

Slowly, he took one hand out and locked his pinkie to hers. He swallowed, hard, cringing inside at what she might say, but instead her expression was calm and even approving. Not giving the slightest hint that she thought this was all silly.

"I pinky-swear to-" to what?

"To stay here and rest until we both agree that you are well enough to leave."

He felt furious and abashed as he quickly repeated the words after her. How – what had he been thinking, telling her that?

"So then, what do you want to eat? Fats, carbohydrates, sugars, protein, fiber? You can't forget your fiber, the last thing you need now is consti-"

He cut her off. "What do you have?"

"Not much," she grumped. "I just got here – as in a few hours ago – and as soon as I showed up, the storm blocked me in."

"Storm?"

"Ice storm. The power went out. And before that tree fell on you, another tree fell on my car. I decided to take the hint and stay put."

She grabbed a flashlight from the floor and rose to her feet.

"My clothes?" he asked, faintly.

She looked at him thoughtfully, and pointed. "They're over there, and as dry as I could make them." She padded out of the room, lighting her way with the flashlight.

As soon as she was turned away he lunged, grabbing his clothes in a single smooth motion and retreating with them under the blanket. At least, that was the idea.

Instead, he found himself on hands and knees on the carpet, colored spots billowing in front of his eyes. He was weak, so weak he couldn't even stand straight. All his ninja grace had deserted him as he tottered to his clothes, took them up in trembling hands, and retreated to the couch to dress. The cloth was still damp and gritty with mud, but they were wearable.

He had on the white briefs, he was relieved to note.

His lab coat was torn in several places, and his shirtfront was in ribbons, but clothed he felt a lot more comfortable: weak but whole. He carefully went down on one knee at the hearth, refilling his pockets with the various lethal tools that had been left there to dry. After that, he curled gratefully back under the warm blanket and looked over the room.

There wasn't much to see; the only furniture was the couch. No decoration, no plants. The grey carpet had felt new under his bare feet, and there was fresh grey paint on the wall, but the place was about as inviting as a bunker. The windows were narrow slits, and stacked against the wall were what looked like powered armored shutters. Waiting to be installed; he could see the wires hanging out of the walls. Raw blueboard showed around the edges of the doors; two doors flanking the fireplace, and one opposite.

There was a shovel leaning by the door that probably led outside; it was wet, and the wetness showed a sharp gleam along the edge of the blade. Interesting….


	2. Hungry Like The Wolf

He heard footsteps and the woman came back into the room, holding a cardboard box under her arm. She frowned, and came closer to him, staring. He held still and stared back; or rather he tried to hold still. He was still shivering, and he couldn't seem to stop.

"Hold out your hand," she asked, and when he didn't move added, "Please?"

He did, reluctantly, and they both watched as it shook and jittered. She shook her head at him sadly.

"Sorry, but you still need to warm up." She put the cardboard box down on the couch beside him, grabbed him by the knees, pulled him forward and slid behind him, planting herself between his back and the back of the couch.

He froze, every muscle locked. She was as close to him as someone in combat, her chest warm against his back, wonderfully warm. He was intensely aware of how much he was enjoying that warmth and how very inappropriate it was. He should be objecting but this was a valid treatment for hypothermia, and he must have already done this with her…he wished very very hard for his memory to come back, but nothing did.

Damn.

"Here," she said, reaching out from under the blanket and rummaging in the box. "This is all I've got. Snacks for the road. How does – chocolate-covered ginger dipped in peanut butter sound?"

"Ugh, it sounds – can I try some?"

She handed him a plastic container of dark brown clumps, and a jar of peanut butter. Protein, he reminded himself. Fats and calories. And fiber too.

"If it's taboo for me to watch you eat, I could close my eyes," she said over his shoulder.

"What?"

She shrugged, which he felt rather than saw. "You never see ninja eating in the movies. So I thought-"

"Shouldn't believe what you see in the movies," he said, and then his mouth was too busy for talking. Chocolate covered ginger dipped in peanut butter turned out to be delicious. Further rummaging in the box produced several loose apples (he ate two) and a bag of what she said was ostrich jerky. She had a gallon jug of water as well.

"Got a glass?'

"Nope," she said.

He blinked painfully, feeling his eyelids rasp against his eyes, and that decided him. There was no way to do it without feeling vulnerable, so he tilted his head back against her shoulder and drank. The water was cold and clear and wonderful, and he drank it in deep gulps, feeling it soak through him to the pores.

At some point during this, his hostess had wrapped her arms around him, over the blanket. The food and the water were starting to make him feel alive again. He closed his eyes and relaxed into her embrace, feeling the shivering finally stop.

"Better?" she asked, pressing her hand to his chest.

"Yes," he breathed. "Much better. I think I can get up now."

"But you're not going to leave yet."

He bit his tongue, then reluctantly conceded, "No. But I should call people-"

The woman wriggled free to sit down beside him, which was a relief. Having her against his back had been VERY distracting. "Until the power comes back on the cell towers won't be working."

"Right. Right…you never told me how I got here. Did you find me, or-?"

"You were wandering in circles in my front yard, and then the tree fell on you. Fortunately you were singing before it fell, or I might not have noticed over the noise of the storm."

He'd been drunk enough to be singing? In public? Not good, not good at all. Well, at least with the power out there wouldn't be any embarrassing footage of it this time.

"And, sorry, did you ever tell me your name?"

"Ann Wales – call me Ann." As he shook her offered hand, he felt hard calluses against his own. Interesting; the calluses weren't in a pattern that he recognized.

"And your front yard is - where, exactly?"

"You're on Caddis Way. We're right up against the Haunted Woods."

"Oh really? Then I can just walk back-" He went to rise and felt his muscles complain, and was almost not surprised when she took him by the shoulder and pushed him back onto the couch. Of course he knew he could get away whenever he wanted to. Except for-

"You can't leave," she snapped, looking up at him. She held up her little finger and added, "You swore. Doctor's orders."

"But I can't just stay here! Anything could be happening – if there's a blackout there's sure to be people gathering firewood. They'll be," he widened his eyes dramatically, "lumberjacking. Paul Bunyans could be tearing the town apart right now. I have to get out there and find out what's happening."

"You told me about the Bunyans. They sound – very intimidating." She bit her lower lip for a moment, considering. "If the power comes back, you could call for a ride, check with the police and see what's going on. I really don't advise you walking in the dark in your condition. If you'll at least wait until dawn, you can see where you're going."

Now there was a good point. He wasn't quite sure where Caddis Way was, although obviously it was in the general same area as his office. Walking over icy unfamiliar ground in the dark was obviously doable - he was a ninja, after all - but a wise ninja saved his strength for battle.

She suddenly snapped her fingers. "And that reminds me - you should break down your sword and dry it, or else the tang might rust out."

That was - astute of her. Not many people knew weapons that well. "And why didn't you do that?" She seemed to have done practically everything else for him.

She looked startled. "Disassemble your weapon?" she asked, in a tone that suggested he'd asked her to do something improper, like, say, take off his pants. "Not without your permission – your sane permission. Besides, I don't think I have the right tools."

"What do you mean, sane?"

"Not tottering and hallucinating?"

Well, he certainly knew how to make a good impression, didn't he? Not only had his mother humiliated him, he'd nearly gotten himself killed by a tree, and had to be rescued by some random stranger. And he couldn't even remember that.

"I just want to figure out what's going on," he said, crossing his arms and scowling at the fire.

"You were hurt! You're recovering! You're allowed to rest, you know."

"Sure," he said, scowling harder.

She sighed, sounding frustrated. "You were a lot friendlier the first time you woke up."

"I was what?"

"Almost charming."

"I must have been really out of it then," he muttered, and then wished he could take the words back.

She made a face. "Well, now you're better, back to normal apparently, and it's not an improvement. And stop pouting!"

"I am not pouting!" he snapped.

"Not you," she said, pointing to his feet. "Him."

Doc looked down and a large feathery puffball looked up at him with dark angry eyes. It was a little puffball of a dog, with lush white fur barely tipped with grey that stood out from its body in a woolly explosion. It seemed to frown at him.

"You couldn't sleep on the couch because I was on it," Ann went on to the dog. "And if you slept on the couch with me, you'd have jumped off and landed on him," she pointed at Doc, "and he would have thrown you through the wall."

"Hey, I would not!"

"You might have, if he landed on you. Woke you up out of a sound sleep and - bam!"

He looked at the dog, and the dog looked back with upset little black eyes. He should probably try to be nice to it; people liked it when you were nice to their pets, right? "Cute dog. I don't recognize the breed."

"I'd say he's ninety percent Pomeranian and ten percent Tribble." He gave her mental points for knowing her Star Trek. "I don't know exactly, I adopted him from a shelter. He's cross at you for disturbing his routine." She reached down and patted the dog on the head. "Go on, back in your carrier."

The dog looked up at them and then turned, fluffy bottom slipping away into the gloom.

He really didn't want to just wait here. On the other hand, if he was stuck here, maybe he should find out why he was stuck here. It was hard to believe that a tree had taken him out, storm or no storm.

"Could I see where the tree fell on me?" He smiled nervously. "I want to see for myself."

She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. "You want to go outside in this weather? You'll get soaked again," she warned him. "None of my rain gear will fit you. And if you make a break for it now, I'm in no mood to chase you."

He stared at her, not consciously looming over her or anything, just - staring. He was good at staring; he'd practiced.

"Fine, fine." She got up and kicked off her slippers, stomping into heavy boots and picking up a second flashlight: this one was blocky with what looked like a built-in radio, just what someone would carry in their car for emergencies. She shrugged a raincoat on, unlocked the front door and stepped out with him silent at her heels.


	3. Somebody's Watching Me

They were not outside; instead they were in a tiny room or hallway, with another door in it. A mudroom, probably, and also another layer of security. Doc evaluated the outer door with a practiced eye: multiple locks, reinforced frame, probably bombproof. The floor was rather muddy new tile, and there were slit windows in the walls.

Ann had a black umbrella set out to dry (he noted the thick woven fabric and made a note to himself: that was almost certainly a carbon-fiber bulletproof umbrella, which was another strange thing to own); and she folded it and stuck it under one arm. Then she opened the next door, and the storm slapped into their faces.

The wind shrieked through the trees, and the rain and hail fell hard enough to hurt. She opened the umbrella and her grip whitened on the handle as she fought to keep it from flying away. The flashlight illuminated bare pebbled ground heavily speckled with hail between slick puddles of ice, but there was a shadow across the side of the yard. She pointed to the shadow.

It was a pine tree; its trunk was nearly four feet thick. It had come within a few feet of crushing the house itself (from what he could see, the house was also as bare as its interior, a plain concrete block that looked more like a utility building than a residence).

"Did the power go out before you heard me?" he said, raising his voice above the wind. From the crashing sounds, there were multiple trees still coming down. He was standing close to Ann, hoping that he wouldn't embarrass himself by falling over on the ice. Or falling onto her, for that matter.

"It did," she said, wiping rain off her face with one hand. They were already soaked to the skin from the knees down from the blowing water. "Another tree must have come down before this one. Good thing too, at least for you."

"Oh?"

"Electrified fence," she said shortly, pointing to a faint grey line in the darkness.

"You don't have a generator?" he asked, fishing for information.

"It's on order," she snapped. "And it is late. I just arrived here, everything should have been ready for me, but instead there's nothing but a shell. The only thing they got right was delivering my firewood. I thought I could crash for one night, call my lawyers in the morning – and then this mess. I hate things throwing me off schedule." She stalked through the darkness, along the rumpled bark of the fallen tree, until they came to a place where the light refused to penetrate.

"Here's the spot," she said, but he did not hear her. He was staring wide-eyed, ignoring the water being whipped into his face by the wind. She held the umbrella a little closer over them.

There was a pool here, black water with bits of wood floating in it. The edges of the pool were runneled with marks, clawing finger marks and footprints, and there were more marks on the trunk itself: white splinters raked out of the bark. Probably by fingers. His fingers.

"You didn't mention the water," he said faintly. He'd thought he woke up wet from the rain, not from being submerged.

"Well, it was supposed to be a fish pond, next year," she frowned down into the water. "I still can't figure out why or how you were standing on the frame, though: it was just canvas over bamboo…"

"Ninja?"

"Oh, of course. Anyway, when I found you, you were under the tree and mostly underwater, and in a very bad mood. Here, hold this."

She handed him the umbrella, and he watched as she wrenched something blue and furry out of the mud, shaking it out and draping it over a fallen tree branch beside her.

"My bathrobe," she sighed. "And," she removed a small silver shape from one pocket and frowned at it, "that's my cell phone." She turned it over and shards of screen tinkled into her palm.

Doc was trying to get his brain to tell him what had happened here, and having no success. He remembered the water, remembered falling into water, but - that was all.

She slipped back under the umbrella and stood shoulder to shoulder with him, staring into the water.

"When you say I was mostly underwater, exactly how far are we talking about?"

She raised her hand to his face and touched his mask just under his nose.

"You couldn't talk, and you were pinned down by the branches," she said, looking off into the distance. "You couldn't get free. So I had to go in and drag you out."

"Whoa, wait - you jumped in after me?"

"Well, you were pretty flat out - clawing at the tree with one hand, waving your sword around with the other. I'm afraid I don't know where the sheath ended up…"

Suddenly he remembered, and started shivering with more than cold.

He was in the water, held down by what felt like a hundred grasping hands. He couldn't breathe through his mouth; he couldn't speak to warn off the woman shouting to him from a few feet away.

Ghosts, he wanted to shout. Ghosts, run away!

"I'm unarmed, you prat!" she shouted, "put down your weapon!" But he couldn't, not when all his training told him otherwise; his sword remained in his free hand, pointing straight at her, while the other hand clawed futilely at the bark.

"Useless," she finally decided aloud, and shrugged off her sodden bathrobe to fall into the mud. His eyes went wide; she was wearing only a white T-shirt that covered her to mid-thigh, and the rain and wind pasted it to her like a second skin. She stepped into the dark water, shuddering all over with shocking ferocity and then sinking into it and swimming to his side.

His sword hovered, a hair's-breadth from her neck, while she leaned close and shouted, "Can you wiggle your toes? Can you breathe?"

He couldn't nod yes, not without dunking his nose into the water, and he couldn't do that; he felt like his two arms and his head were the only parts of him not being drained of life by the cold. He couldn't go under-

"Wiggle your toes, now!" she ordered, and slid under the surface; he felt her hands moving down the sides of his torso, and then didn't feel them. Had his legs already gone numb? Was his neck broken, or his back-

"They wiggled," she gasped, rising from the water. Her teeth were audibly chattering. "No t-time, I gotta get you loose, man. Branches in your clothes…" She sank down and he felt her hands again, yanking at his lab coat and shirt and pants, cloth shredding under her fingers.

She rose and grabbed him, under the armpits, bracing her feet against the tree trunk, her face to his, cheek warm against him as she grabbed and pulled and shouted "Keep your face up!" and then he was-

"Are you still in there?"

Doc flinched as a hand waved in front of his nose.

"You – got me loose."

"That's right," Ann said, slowly, as though to someone who was ill – or merely stupid. "And you told me that the ghosts were chasing you."

He deliberately chuckled, even though he had rarely felt less like laughing. "Oh, really. Ghosts?"

She took the flashlight and turned it off, and they stared up into the darkened woods. The trees were moving with the wind, but some of them were moving against it: branches stretching out towards them like black hands. Light crawled over the branches, green and blue, and staring eyes seemed to flicker from every shadow.

Ghosts, Doc thought, feeling something inside him wail in terror and quickly silencing it. He'd never seen so many ghosts, so close. Not here, not like this.

"Ghosts," she said, gesturing casually as though a wall of living hostile supernatural energy was nothing special. "Fortunately my idiot contractors did get the whitethorn hedge put in, and they don't want to cross it."

"Um, isn't the tree over the hedge?"

She frowned at the spray of roots in the distance. "I hadn't thought of that."

"Well I have, and now they have, so maybe we can go back to the house now, please?" The ghosts were creeping along the trunk of the fallen tree, rippling like angry water.

"After you," she invited.

"Back to the house…" He took the flashlight from her hand without asking and looked as they retreated, finding two set of intertwined footsteps sunk deep into the mud. There were knee- and handprints mixed in where one or both of them had fallen, but he doggedly followed the marks back to the house, through the entrance and across the floor (the carpet was marked with a broad swatch of half-dried mud). The trail went through a door to the right of the fireplace, but as soon as he thought of going through it he felt the breath lock in his throat.

He felt – fear. Senseless fear. Terror, but there was no reason. Was there? What could be in there?

Don't go in there, his inner voice urged. Don't go in there, don't ask what happened!

Slowly, forcing himself on step by step, he went in and felt the icy breath of the room ooze over him. It wasn't anything to be afraid of, just a bathroom with a rather muddy floor. The flashlight showed him white tile, a bathtub, a sink, and mirrors. But they were all broken: the mirrors in shards, dents in the tile. It looked like someone – or someones – had had one hell of a fight.

"What happened in here?" he asked, and heard his inner voice wail NO!

"You did, mostly. You didn't want any help, not at first. Hmm - if you throw me into the mirror, does that count as you or me breaking it?"

"Me, I think. Seven – no, twenty-one years' bad luck." He winced. "Sorry. I'm glad you're not badly hurt. I – what did you do to set me off?"

"Nothing! I tried to get away from you, actually. But first you wanted to fight, and then you started babbling about ghosts and – oh, all sorts of stuff. I just tried to keep you from hurting yourself until you calmed down."

Another snippet of memory: her hands on him, her arms squeezing him, her lips burning against his face – but nothing else. That didn't seem like a fight, though. What was it?

"Why is it so damn cold in here?" he protested, seeing his breath steam in front of his face.

"That I don't know," she said, glaring up at the concrete ceiling. "It's not the ventilation fan because the power's off. I'm going to have to examine the insulation – later. Once the power is back on."

She turned and ran her hand along one painted concrete wall, and her sleeve rode up her arm a little.

"You are hurt," he said, moving to take the arm. She took a step away and slipped, twisting and getting her balance back in an instant. It was only an instant, but it told him something very important: she'd been trained. Maybe not as a fighter; a dancer? She was on the short side for a dancer. But there was something wrong with the way she had moved. It was probably just her stiff neck, though.

"You told me not to let you look at it."

He rolled his eyes. "Exactly how many times are you going to use that line on me?"

"Look," she pulled back the sleeve farther, showing a deep crusted gash in her skin - but she pulled the sleeve down before he could see all of it. "It's just from scraping against the tree. You told me not to let you touch it because you weren't sterile, and that I should come to your office later."

"I don't remember saying that."

Her face brightened. "Does that mean I don't have to come to your office?"

"No."

"Well, it was worth a try."

"Look, if you won't come to my office, have your regular doctor-"

"Like I said, I just moved here. I don't have a regular doctor."

"Then you have to come to my office, right?" He smirked at her upset expression, and then winced; even moving the muscles of his face hurt. He turned and looked at himself in the remains of one of the mirrors. His pupils looked even, but his eyes were awfully bloodshot. There was a half-circle of bruise in the middle of his forehead neatly bisected by the top point of his mask, and he went to peel it back and see – and froze.

I am in bad shape, he told himself. I nearly started lifting my mask with a stranger right here!

But Ann wasn't here; she had stepped out of the bathroom and closed the door, and her voice came from outside. "I suppose you'd like some privacy?"

"Yes, thank you," he said, peeking at his forehead with the aid of the smaller flashlight that she had thoughtfully left behind. The bruise was not the result of a tree branch, he decided; it looked exactly like the mark you got when someone drove the heel of their hand into your head, hard. But who could have done that? He didn't remember – maybe Mom had done it. Certainly it hadn't been Ann; he'd have taken her arm off by reflex. That thought made him feel queasy, again.

Her voice came from outside the door. "When you do leave, I can't send you out in that shirt, you know. You look like a zombie."

"I do not!" he said indignantly. Then he looked down at himself - filthy, clothes in ribbons - and reconsidered. "Well, only a little…"

"Stay there, will you?" Noises from the next room, then a knock at the bathroom door.

"Are you decent?"

"Of course," he said, offended. "Why?"

She opened the door and handed in a bundle of white cloth. "Here, men's shirts. Got 'em for when I had a sunburn. They might fit."

"You didn't-"

"What?" she asked, leaning back into the room.

He felt the color rising to his cheeks, but he had to go on. "You didn't take off my mask, did you?"

"Oh please!" She laughed and in what looked like reflex, raised one hand to cover her mouth. "You fought me like a wild animal when I tried to get your tie off; no way was I going to touch your mask! I didn't want to embarrass you; I just didn't want you freezing to death in my bathtub."

"Oh. Okay," he said, shaking out the cloth and looking at several plain button-down shirts.

"Mind you, white cotton briefs can be quite transparent when wet."

He shot a furious look at the door, but it was closed, and he heard Ann moving off into the house. He vaguely heard her talking to her dog– something about him being a sweet, sweet boy. At least she'd better be talking to the dog.

The first two shirts were obviously too small; he slipped off his coat and shirt and tried the third one, and it was too tight in the arms. He took a moment to review the fine assortment of bruises he acquired overnight on his shoulders and back; fortunately none of them were where his clothes would dig into them, but he was going to be tender for days. The fourth shirt fit, badly: the sleeves a little too long, the collar too tight. But he eased the top button open and let the tie cover it, and put his lab coat on over it. Then he took up the flashlight and decided to go exploring.

He slipped back out to the room with the fireplace – the living room, he guessed he would call it. There were more signs of the place still being under construction: electrical outlets without their faceplates, plaster dust in the corners. He tried the door to the left of the fireplace, and found another short corridor with a tiny kitchen off of it. Or rather the start of a kitchen: there was no stove, no refrigerator, and the faucets were stacked in the sinks.

He mentally measured the distance from the corridor wall to the far wall of the kitchen, subtracted that plus the bathroom from the width of the living room, and came up with an intriguing remainder. There was almost certainly another room between the bathroom and the kitchen, but he hadn't seen a door into it yet.

"Stop wriggling, you'll fall," Ann said faintly in the back room, and he went to see what she was talking about. This one looked identical to the front room, minus the fireplace. There was no furniture – and also no door into the mysterious center section. There was a door to the outside, heavily bolted, and more slit windows. A black trash bag lolled in the center of the room, with clothing hanging out of it.

Ann was sitting on the floor, typing at a laptop in front of her, illuminated only by the screen. Her dog was sprawled across her shoulders like a cat, looking indecently comfortable. She looked up and gave him a bitter closed-mouth smile.

"Welcome to my fully furnished home," she said, spreading her arms wide. "Everything arranged, everything paid for…and when I arrive, they have left one piece of furniture. And is it my desk? Is it my bed? Oh no, it's my couch. Just to prove that they do have my stuff, and expect me to come wheedle it out of them. If I didn't know better, I'd say they were all working together to piss me off."

He didn't envy whoever 'they' were; Ann looked angry enough to bite. He decided to change the subject.

"How do I look?" he said, holding his arms out a little for inspection.

She turned the laptop to illuminate him (he peeked and saw a page of computer code), and looked him up and down. "You could almost pass for human."

"Almost?"

"Almost."


	4. Hanging on the Telephone

Doc had stationed himself by one of the windows, irritably drumming his fingers on his crossed arms. He had already dried and reassembled his sword, and it waited on the fireplace hearth for him. Grey pre-dawn light lit the side of his mask.

"I really think I'm well enough to leave now," he said for the third time. He was bored, to be honest: he'd eaten most of the available food. And it turned out that his hostess had a gluten allergy, so she didn't have any wheat or grain products at all. No bread, no muffins, nothing. And no hot water for tea, either.

"As a houseguest, you are a real pill, you know that?" Ann snarled from the couch; she was lying there with her eyes closed, denying his every effort to make her move. Her dog lay on the floor beside her, whining a little at the anger in her voice.

"I could just go."

"Don't expect me to go find you after you slip and break your leg. Or if you collapse and the ghosts get you."

"Come on, it's almost dawn. Sun up, storm over, ghosts gone, everything will be fine. Any time now…any minute now…"

There was a sudden hum, and the recessed lights above the fireplace came on.

"Finally!" she said, rolling to her feet. "Let's go outside and see if your phone works. Ghost, stay."

"WHAT ghost?" he half-shouted, diving over the couch and reaching for his sword.

"Okay, and can you stop jumping around like that too? The dog is named Ghost. Ghost, stay here." The dog yipped as they went outside.

Outside was a disaster zone. Every surface was covered with a thick fluff of blown pine needles, and under that fluff was ice, black and wet and gleaming. The ground was littered with small branches, and several trees were bowed over the fence in various places. There was a constant pattering and crackling, as ice melted off the trees. From under the green canopy of one fallen tree, the nose of a car poked out.

"Is your car wrecked?"

"No, just dented. But I can't move it until I get that tree off it." The woods around the property were just as bad; the white slashes of broken-off tree limbs were everywhere. "Good thing it's above freezing; if this ice stayed on the ground we'd really be in trouble. Is your phone working?"

"Oh yeah." Quickly, he dialed the office.

Judy answered, her deep gorilla's voice unmistakable. "Ugh?"

"Judy! Do we have power?"

"Ugh."

He couldn't hear the generator running in the background, so that must be a 'yes.' "I was stranded by the storm, I'll be there as soon as I can. Can you put Gordito on?"

"Ook," and a wordless shout, and then Gordito's voice in his ear, high and excited.

"Doc! Where are you?"

Ann was watching him, her head cocked as though listening.

"I'm all right, I just got," he looked at her, "sidetracked?"

"'I met a strange lady, she made me nervous'," Ann sang off-key. "'She took me in and gave me breakfast.'"

"Will you be hush," Doc hissed at her.

(Tell the truth, his inner voice prompted. He won't believe you anyway.)

He paid no attention to that voice, just reassured Gordito that he would be there as soon as he could, and extracting from him the information that there were two patients waiting for him.

"Your son?" Ann asked after he hung up.

"My sidekick," he said shortly.

"Ninja have sidekicks? Well, all right. Now, may I borrow your phone please?"

"Why?" Two could play the unhelpful game.

"Because my land line is still not connected, and my cell phone is busted, and I want to call Memorial Hospital."

"Why? Are you going to go have that arm looked at?"

"No, because I work there," she frowned.

"Oh." He handed the phone over, and she dialed quickly with one thumb.

"Hello, is your power on? Good, glad to hear it. Extension 1113, please." She waited, and then flashed a narrow grin at nothing. "Good morning, Francois, this is Ann. How's it going down there?"

Doc had no compunction about eavesdropping - why should he? She didn't. And he could hear Francois' voice quite clearly as he said, "Fine. When will you be in for the orientation interview? Everything's set up."

Ann swallowed, mouth suddenly twisted awry. She saw Doc listening, and mouthed to him, New job.

Doc sized her up: unwashed, bruised, her hair standing out around her head like a dandelion, dark circles under her eyes – not exactly a face to show to the world. From the sounds of it the storm had completely messed up her first day at work. And he hadn't helped. No wonder she was in such a foul mood.

"Ah, well. Francois, I'm afraid I'm going to have to reschedule…no, wait, tell them I'll phone in."

"Are you sure? That doesn't make for a very good first impression."

She sighed. "Believe me, if they saw me they'd be even less impressed. You know that house I was moving into? I arrived last night. Nothing – and I mean nothing – is set up. Not even Internet access!"

Francois audibly gasped.

"So nothing was ready. And I had a power outage, and my car's under a tree, and I really – look, I can't be there in person, OK? But if the power is on in most of Cumberland-"

"It is," he interrupted.

"Good. Then I'm going to find somewhere with wifi, dial in for the meeting with my laptop, and then call my lawyers. All of my lawyers."

"Was the storm really that bad? We just had the power out for a few hours."

"Up here it looks like someone dropped my property through a paper shredder. And I don't look much better, do I?" That to Doc, who winced and then nodded in agreement.

"After the meeting I'll find a hotel somewhere with Net access. I'll email you once I'm online and tell you where to reach me. Oh, and you can't call me back at this number; I'm borrowing Doctor McNinja's cell phone."

_"_ You are? Why?"

"Well, mine got wrecked, and he was stranded at my place by the storm – what?" she asked, as Doc frantically gestured for her to be silent. He didn't think he wanted random strangers knowing where he had been.

"Oh, he was, was he?"

"Are you implying something, Francois?" Ann said in a low liquid tone that sounded dangerous. "You  do realize that he's close enough that he can hear every word you say?"

"How close?"

She shot a sharp glance at her guest. "I could count the freckles on his eyelids for you, if you like, the next time he blinks. Which might not be any time soon," she added, meeting his furious glare with an innocent little smile. "He's not looking very blinky. In fact, he looks pretty mad to me. Ooh! Maybe he's so mad that he'll come over there and drop you on top of the back-up server!"

"Ann, don't say that!"

"It's the big silver box with Digital in red letters on the front of it, in the left-hand corner of the computer room; I've seen it on the webcam," she told Doc, and then said back to the phone, "Or maybe vice versa – he could drop the server on you! It's very heavy; I bet it would make a nice dent."

"Ann!"

"Francois," her voice dropped, "I have a watch with more storage capacity than that so-called backup server. I could emulate everything it does on a pocket calculator. The best thing that could happen is that it fails and be replaced with something more modern, and I've recommended that. So a little medically-approved euthanasia might be just the thing."

She glanced at Doc again, while Francois spluttered on the other end of the line.

"Uh-oh," she said ominously. "He just cocked an eyebrow at me. I'd better hang up before he fires an eyeball and blows my head off…I'll be online later. Bye!" She clicked the phone shut and offered it back to Doc, and he took it with a certain lack of good grace.

"Extension 1113, you said?"

She dipped her chin and looked up at him. "He is a good computer administrator," she said. "Maybe you could drop the server on him – lightly?"

He tucked his phone away without answering. Ann was looking over her property, frowning.

"I thought I had had enough trees taken out," she said, her eyes burning in the sunlight. "Another thing they screwed up. I wonder - never mind," she said, turning and looking up at the mountain behind them.

"Never mind what?" he said, and turned and looked as well. Then he swallowed, as a creeping sense of unease rose up from the pit of his stomach.

Ann's house was at the foot of a mountain. Not the mountain that concealed his parents' house; he thought this was one over from it. And there was a stripe slanting down the side of the mountain, a path of smashed branches and fallen trees, and it pointed straight to Ann's house.

"Tell me, Doctor," her voice was too soft, "is there some reason that ghosts would chase you down a mountain, dropping trees on you at every step? Or is it that you just don't like trees?"

"I, er," his collar suddenly seemed tighter than ever, "maybe it's just a coincidence?"

"Or maybe," she leaned closer to him, "just maybe - I live in the corner penthouse of Spook Central."

His heart made a little flip-flop in his chest.

"That's a quote from-"

"Ghostbusters, I know," he finished her sentence.

Without noticing his reaction, she turned and scowled at the woods. "Anyway. You seem to be standing up straight, Doctor, and someone knows that you're on your way and can come looking for you if you don't make it. So," she held up her little finger and ceremoniously curled it down, "you are free to go."

"What are you going to do?"

"Just like I said – take my laptop and start walking."

"I could call you a cab-" he offered.

"No, I'll be – oh, what am I saying? Yes, please. If you go down my driveway, go left past six driveways on your left, and through three gates, you'll be on Haunted Wood Drive. If you could tell a cab to meet me there in thirty minutes, that would be awesome."

He frowned, a little crease appearing between his eyebrows. "Six driveways – not six houses?"

"Nope. Unfinished gated community," Ann said, waving her arm to indicate the whole area. "This is the only house done."

He had to ask. "Do I – do I really have freckles on my eyelids?"

She leaned close, peering. "They're very faint, but yes. If you got more sun they'd probably really show."

(I think she likes you, murmured his inner voice again, and Doc silently told it to shut up.)

"So, um, goodbye," he said awkwardly.

"Yes. I will sincerely do my best to come to your office about the arm today. Promise."

He almost told her not to bother, to get it done at the hospital, but she was still talking.

"And, Doctor?" She gave him a smile with no warmth in it at all. "The next time you feel the urge to drink yourself into a dangerous fury? Do the world a favor, and get yourself a brick."

He just looked at her. She hadn't mentioned him being drunk before. He had hoped that she hadn't noticed.

She went on, "A gold brick maybe, you can wrap it in a slice of lemon if you like, but definitely get a brick."

"A brick," he finally repeated.

"Yes, and then some more bricks, and some mortar, and a cask of Antomillado. Find yourself a nice niche, wall yourself in, drink the Antomillado, and don't come out until you're sober, OK? It'll save everyone involved a lot of trouble."

"I still want to see you at my office," he said as she turned away.

She glanced back at him. "I said I would, all right?"

* * *

Ann went back into the house, shut the door firmly, and watched crossly through one of the narrow windows as he dashed out of sight.

"That man needs a pause button," she muttered to herself, and then said a nasty word. He'd left his sword! There it was, lying on her hearth.

She frowned hard enough to make her lips whiten. Now she'd have to go see him, after all.


	5. Money for Nothing

Judy was, to be honest, in a bit of a snit. Not that this showed in her manner of course: she was a professional, and held herself to the highest standards. It had been a long day, filled with the usual mix of people somewhat ill, people dangerously ill, and people whose stupidity turned her own stomach. Now, finally, the stream of people seemed to be slowing. Right now there was only one person in the waiting room, and she was just bundling up her daughters (one ear infection, one severe case of sympathetic earache) so they could go outside.

Judy's hairy hand was reaching for the switch to turn on the sign outside the office for the night, but then she paused, thinking. Doctor McNinja had been extremely frazzled when he had finally shown up this morning; perhaps it would be better to leave the sign off, and give him a chance to rest. But then, wouldn't you know it, a car turned into the parking lot. Not a car Judy recognized: a dark green Ford sedan. The woman who got out of it wasn't familiar either, but Judy's attention snapped from her to the paper shopping bag in her hand.

Sticking out of the bag was the hilt of a sword.

Judy's finger moved to the alarm button, and then paused again.

Certainly, there had been attacks on the Doctor's office. But attackers usually, well, dressed for the occasion. They didn't show up in blue jeans, and they didn't carry their weapons as though they were groceries. So Judy moved her hand from the alarm button to the large ceramic vase on her desk. The bottom of that was loaded with lead shot, and was more than heavy enough to knock out any normal attacker.

The woman walked in, took in the waiting room at a glance, and then headed straight for Judy.

"Hello," the woman's eyes darted to her nameplate and back, "ma'am. I know it's late, but Doctor McNinja asked me to see him. Actually," her expression grew a little colder, "he sort of insisted. I haven't been here before, so-"

Judy grunted and pushed a clipboard across the desk.

"Thank you," the woman said, and then lifted the shopping bag in her hand. "Oh, and I should return the Doctor's sword to him; he left it at my place last night...."

A muted giggle; they both turned and stared at the woman sitting there, who just smiled and left with a bit too much haste in her step. The new woman shrugged, and then brought up the sword – not holding it by the handle, but rather balancing it across the back of both her wrists. She had wrapped the blade in paper, and tied a length of string around and around it. Now she offered the weapon to Judy in a strangely ceremonial gesture, as though she handled swords as part of some ritual all the time.

Judy nodded and took the weapon in both hands with equal care. She thoroughly approved of treating weapons with respect. She looked over the strange woman while she worked on the new patient form. This must be the mysterious someone who the Doctor had stayed with, for whatever reason. Gordito had had his own theories as to why he'd been out all night, and Doctor McNinja had just shushed him and dived into his work.

The woman spun the clipboard back around to where Judy could read it. The name Ann Wales, and an email address, but most of the rest of the form was either wrong, N/A, or – MYOB? Judy scowled horribly (which was quite impressive on a gorilla her size) and pointed to the first wrong entry, a PO Box where the street address should be.

"No mail delivery at my current address; new construction."

Judy's thick black finger stabbed at the empty space for Current Physician.

"He's in Europe – to be exact, he's buried in Europe. His office burnt down with him in it, so there are no records to transfer."

Judy's finger darted over the page and finally settled on the Current Insurance line, which said only Benjamin Franklin, with no plan number. She grunted inquisitively, and Miss Wales reached inside her jacket and pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. She twisted her fingers, and the bills fanned out, a stack of new hundreds. Then she folded them away.

"My insurance of choice," she said, and gave a narrow smile. Judy sniffed, but took the clipboard and gestured for the patient to follow her as they went back to the examination rooms.

The first room they looked in was empty; the Doctor was in the second one. He was sprawled out on the examination table, apparently asleep.

Judy knew better than to go up to him and touch him; she was considering a good loud hoot, or perhaps throwing something, when Miss Wales turned to her with an awful look of mischief in her blue eyes.

* * *

 

Doc was not asleep. He was just resting, perfectly still, eyes closed, breathing slowly. The soreness of his muscles was starting to fade, and several good-sized meals had taken him well along the path to recovery. But it was so good to just lie down (wide awake of course. Ninja awake, not to put too fine a point on it) and unwind for an instant. He would be perfectly aware if anyone approached, absolutely...

Too close, a woman's voice whispered, "Get the speculum."

His eyes snapped open and he shot to his feet – to face Judy, grinning wide and coughing laughter through her teeth. And the woman was-

"You!" he said, a little scattered still.

"Me," Ann said, taking her clipboard and bringing it to him. "Here for my sewing-up, as you requested." She didn't look too thrilled with the prospect. But she did look better: she seemed to have managed a bath somewhere, changed into clean clothes and combed her hair down.

He read the clipboard. Non-smoker, non-drinker, forty years old – forty? She was a very well-preserved forty; there were faint lines beside her eyes, but from the neck down she could be a fit thirty-year-old. (His mind insisted on calling up a picture of how she looked in a wet T-shirt; he deliberately shoved that picture aside). He sat her down on the table and rolled up the sleeve of her faded blue denim shirt, and winced: the cut was wide and deep, and he could see splinters still in it.

"This will scar," he warned her, and she only shrugged. He shrugged back, mentally rather than physically, and went to work with needle and thread and tweezers.

"I'm almost surprised you came," he said, carefully adjusting the tension in his thread.

"Well, I talked to Francois, and he said that if I didn't come at your say-so, you were liable to hunt me down and abduct me. So I've talked to my lawyers, gotten them set on the tail of my so-called contractors, and here I am."

He looked up at her narrow-eyed, and she glared at him. His lips pursed under the mask, and without replying he went back to his sewing. He had to keep pausing, to remove wood splinters embedded in the wound. His hands formed a steady rhythm, sewing and picking, picking and flicking. The silence was starting to get to him, so he tried to get her to talk. "Are your lawyers from around here?"

"I retained Piranha and Piranha."

"You're kidding! There's really a law firm called Piranha and Piranha?"

She grinned at him, and again he noticed her hand flicking up to cover her mouth. "I know, isn't it great! I fell in love with their business cards. They have this adorable little engraved line around the edges that looks like teeth." She pulled one of those cards out of her back pocket, and showed it to him. 'Piranha and Piranha / Buenos Aires – Kingsport – New York,' and the engraving did indeed look like teeth.

"They're chewing out, or rather up, the contractors, and I hope to find all my various missing bits and bobs by the weekend. The storm didn't damage Caddis Way itself; I've hired a clean-up crew. I hope they are more competent than the home installation crew."

"Well, at least you weren't severely hurt," he said, tying off the thread.

"Only my feelings. And a few incidental combat injuries."

He snorted in mild contempt – what did she know from combat injuries? - and she turned her head to look at him.

"Perhaps you could diagnose these four bruises on my neck?" She raised her free hand and brushed her hair back, turning her head from side to side. "And this one, right on the other side-"

He raised his own hand halfway and then dropped it; of course he knew the marks of his own fingers. At some point he'd grabbed Ann hard enough to bruise.

"So?" he managed to shrug. "You said I was hallucinating. If I thought I was defending myself…"

She cocked an angry eye at him. "Close the door, please."

He crossed his arms over his chest, and took two steps backwards, but declined to go to the door. "No," he said flatly."

"Well, fine then," she grumped. She popped the snaps at wrist and neck of her long-sleeved shirt and shrugged it stiffly back over her shoulders and onto the examination table, baring her upper arms.

Doc made a little hurt noise in the back of his throat. He stepped forward and stared at his marks on her. Deep gouging bruises, the marks of fingers and fists, hard red-purple welts all up and down her arms. They were clustered around her elbows and the nerve points on her biceps. This wasn't the marks of him randomly flailing at her in delirium; he had actually been attacking her.

This was so embarrassing, either way. As a doctor he knew he shouldn't have hurt her at all; as a ninja he should be ashamed of not killing her.

He wondered if his legal insurance was paid up. Maybe she couldn't bring a criminal suit against him, but a civil suit…?

"Getting these was very painful, Doctor," Ann said relentlessly. "And some of it was definitely offensive rather than defensive in nature."

"I…" he turned her arm carefully under the harsh light, confirming that he had in fact printed his blows all over her arms, up to where the freckled white skin vanished under the sleeve of her T-shirt.

"And that's not the worst of it," she droned on. "Want to see?"

"Not really…" he said, honestly enough.

"Now now, a good Doctor should know his own work, right?" She slid off the table and turned, and raised her shirt in back.

He actually flinched: her whole lower back was a mass of square bruises.

"That's from my bathroom sink," she said over her shoulder. "You threw me against it. Several times. I am seriously considering getting a new sink at this point, because I feel I know this one far, far better than I ought to."

"You didn't mention this on your admissions form."

"No, I didn't."

"Look, I can book you for an MRI-"

"Out of the question," she said, with a sudden bright spark of new anger in her eye. Or was that fear? He could see muscles tensing in her neck. She must be one of those people who were afraid of MRI machines.

Doc felt his own temper start to rise. "You might have internal injuries."

"And what am I going to say about the marks all over me? Oh, some anonymous person beat me up? I don't think that will fly." She lowered her shirt. "Doctor, please. I am very tired and short of temper, and I just want to go back to my hotel and get some sleep. If I show any symptoms of internal injury, I will be sure to let you know. So the arm, please, and I'll get out of your hair."

He was working on her wrist now, which was the most delicate part; the skin moved in different directions here, and he had to be careful in placing his stitches. It was a great reason not to have to look her in the eye as he said, "But – except for that, your first day at work was okay?"

Silence. Then, "It was the storm that messed me up, Doctor – no, actually. It was me. Waiting until the last second to move, because I hate setting up all over again. So if I'd come in on Friday or even Saturday, I'd have seen what a mess the place was, gone straight out to a hotel, and not been there when the storm hit."

She raised her free hand as though she was going to touch his shoulder, then dropped it. "And of course, then you'd probably be dead."

He tied off the last stitch a little faster than necessary and then straightened, looking at her, realizing the truth.

"You wouldn't have been there when the ghosts chased me down the mountain," he said, his voice a little high in his ears. "They pin me down under the tree, in the water; I can't get any leverage. I can't escape."

"You die of hypothermia," Ann said. "Either the contractors find you when they're moving the tree, or I go out one day and say 'Hey, what's that funny-looking rock in my fish pond?'" Now she did raise her hand, and tap him on the temple. "And that rock is the back of your wet, dead head."

He finished the bandaging with quick choppy movements, and wasn't surprised when she waved away his offer of an antibiotic prescription. He was a little distracted by the vivid thoughts of what might have happened, so he didn't try to force the issue. She put her shirt and jacket back on and marched out of the examination room with long strides, and he followed after her more out of curiosity than anything else.

Well, and he was also was trying to think of a really good parting line, and not coming up with one.

When they got back to the waiting room, though, someone was seated there. A small dark figure, holding a magazine over his face as though reading.

Gordito lowered the magazine and pointed at Ann's back. He mouthed silently, Is that her?

Doc cocked an eyebrow at him, and then winced as the boy gave Ann a thorough up-and-down look and then an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Ann didn't notice; instead she turned to Judy and said, "Is my bill ready?"

Judy raised her eyebrows, and Doc coughed, waving one hand dismissingly. "No charge," he said, while his other hand made shooing motions to Gordito behind his back.

Ann looked at him with a bitterly dark look. "I intend to pay," she said, face set hard.

Judy frowned and pointed at the ledger sitting on her desk, shorthand for 'We can't afford to give out freebies.'

"Well, I insist on you not paying," Doc snapped back, his voice a parody of politeness.

She turned her back on him and leaned over the desk towards Judy, eyes imploring now.

"Ma'am, could you please give me a very quick written estimate of what I would owe," and then over her shoulder, "if I was paying?"

Judy considered, tapped at her calculator a few times, then wrote a figure on a Post-It note and showed it to her.

"All right – Doctor? Please keep still?" She backed away one step, reaching into her jacket pocket.

"Doctor, stop?" He was moving towards her, hands swaying in little circular twitching motions like he would snatch any money she happened to offer. "Stop? OK? I would like you to take this money," which she pulled out of her pocket and slapped down on the blotter very fast, before Doc's hand could get it. "And the next time a patient comes in who can't pay, please put this towards their bill. All right?"

Judy softly hooted her approval, tucking the cash into her drawer. Doc leaned back, looking confused.

"Thank you. High five?"

Judy held out one broad leathery palm and Ann slapped it with her own, lightly. Doctor McNinja held out his own hand for a high-five, and she looked at it like it was something vaguely distasteful. Without touching his hand, she turned, saw Gordito as he lowered the magazine, and screamed at the top of her lungs.

It was not a scream of fear: it was a scream of rage. She was dropping, pulling her weight down into her heels, muscles tensing as she prepared to spring, hands out to grab, mouth suddenly huge and teeth bared.

With a slap-snap, Gordito's guns were both out and trained on Ann's torso; at the same instant there was a brisk pop as Judy scooped up the Doctor's sword, flicked it once to cut through the string, and flipped it into his outstretched hand. Judy's hand then fell onto her weighted vase.

Ann's feet had not yet quite left the ground when she suddenly changed her mind. Her toes slid across the carpet like it was butter, and she flopped, landing on knees and elbows, both hands clamped over her mouth, staring up at Gordito with wide eyes.

There was a pause that was practically the textbook definition of awkward.

"Sorry," Ann said, her voice muffled behind her hands.

"What was that all about?" Gordito asked, eyes narrowed. His guns were still trained on Ann's face.

She moved her hands and showed an anxious expression. "I…thought you were someone else."

Gordito blinked. That was a new one. How many mustached twelve-year-olds were there around that he could be confused with?

"Ah, this is Gordito, my charge," Doc offered.

"Charge as in electric? Sorry," Ann continued, gingerly climbing back to her feet. "Very sorry. I'm very tired. And nervous. And tired." She looked up at Doc's mask, her eyes carefully avoiding the honed blade poised to strike, and said meekly, "May I go now, Doctor?"

"Please," he bit out, and she wasted no time in scuttling out to her car. The headlights popped on in the dusk and she was gone with a silent purring of the motor; the little white dog peeked out of the back window and barked at them as the car turned away.

Gordito shook his head, putting his guns away. "Sorry, Doc, but I think you got another weirdo."

"Weirdo?" he said indignantly.

"Well, I thought she looked all right, you know? Not too skinny. Solid. But – I don't know what that was all about." He rose and frowned into the dusk, then looked back at Doc. "And why did she cover her mouth?"

"Judy," Doc asked, turning to his receptionist. "Send Miss Wales an email and tell her to come back in a week to get those stitches removed."

Judy signed, Didn't you use dissolving stitches?

"Judy…I don't know sign language. Sure, I used dissolving stitches but…say I need to check for infection. Or something."

* * *

 

Doctor McNinja didn't have to think about Ann Wales over the next few days. He would see her next week, and that was enough. There were patients to see, paperwork to fill out, exercise and training and planning and monitoring.

Sometimes, though, he sat still, his eyes closed, and tried to deliberately call up his inner voice. What did you say to her, he would call down the corridors of his mind. Why did you tell her about the pinky swear? What happened in the bathroom? What do you know that I don't?

Silence was his answer. Silence, and the sensation of killing cold and lethal fear, combined.

He thought of her in his dreams. Again and again he stood in her freezing-cold bathroom, in the flickering beam of a flashlight, screaming at something that wasn't there. She grabbed him, held him up with hands that burned like fire on his cold skin. Sometimes she spoke in English, and sometimes she howled strings of gibberish, and none of it made any sense.

He woke up wide-eyed, clutching at the sheets with hard fingers.

He generally gritted his teeth before he went back to sleep. He considered just calling her and asking what had happened, and then pushed that thought away. He wanted to talk to her face to mask.

* * *

Cumberland, Maryland was a small enough town that gossip tended to circulate fairly quickly. The story of Doctor McNinja staying overnight at a strange woman's house, and her showing up at his office with his discarded sword, was too good not to repeat. The story was passed on and embellished until wedding bells were practically chiming and infant names picked out.

It was inevitable that eventually these rumors would reach the wrong set of ears – the shapely masked ears of Mitzi, Doctor McNinja's very deadly mother.


	6. Do You Really Want to Hurt Me

Judy was sitting behind her desk in reception when a miracle came through the door.

It was sugarcane. Not the tiny stunted stalks found in supermarkets: this was a great sheaf of the stuff, fresh enough that the sap dripped wet from the ends and the leaves were still crisp and green. Her brown eyes widened and her mouth made a silent O of approval.

"Glad you like it," said Ann Wales, peering from around the bundle. "I went through a farmers' market and thought this would do for you." She gave the cane over to Judy, who accepted it with happy eyes. If only she had-

"And here's an extra bucket for the pulp," Ann said, handing it across without further comment and thereby solidifying her reputation in Judy's eyes as Good People.

Then Ann leaned closer, and her face grew more serious. "Doctor McNinja wanted to take these stitches out. I'll just be waiting out by my car calming my dog down. It won't take more than a minute."

Judy arched one eyebrow, watching as Ann went outside. She scribbled a note on her pad and tucked it atop the next patient's file. The phone rang, and she looked at the number display with widened eyes and immediately transferred the call to the Doctor. Let him deal with it.

* * *

 

Ann stepped outside, looking up into the cold sky with a smug expression. She was in a particularly good mood right now, and she hoped to get this appointment over with without ruining her mood. Unfortunately for her plans, when she got back to her car and looked in the back seat, the small dog carrier sat empty.

"Ghost. Ghost, come! Heel!" Her mouth set in a hard white line: that dog could get out of anywhere these days. He was probably trotting around making a nuisance of himself-

A shrill bark from around the corner of the building, and she went to see. And yes, there he was, bothering some tall tan person.

"Ghost! Sit!" She came panting up, grabbed Ghost and tucked him under one arm, and then stood to apologize to this – um, well possibly not a person.

He, or maybe she, stood considerably taller than Ann, and was brown with darker stripes. Bipedal, with very prominent claws on hands and feet, and a long mouth lined with sharp teeth. S/he bent closer and sniffed at Ghost's head as though baffled, and Ghost licked at the scaly brown nose with delight.

"Ghost, you're being rude," she said. "Ah, excuse me – sir?"

The tan person cocked one eye at her, staring with no expression that she could recognize.

She considered the person again: long tail, forward-slung torso, scales, no hair. She cocked her head, setting her eyes at the same angle as the other's, and growled "Hnnrhisss?"

The tan person's eyes seemed to bulge with excitement. "Rhhhattch!"

Someone laughed, very close by, and Ann jumped backwards in shock.

"Oh man," said the boy who had startled her so badly before. Gordito, that was his name, and he was just as alarming as last time, and still armed. "Oh man, that is funny. Are you trying to talk to Yoshi?"

"I'm sorry," she said, "is he shy?"

That set Gordito off again; this time he actually bent over laughing, wheezing and clutching his ribs.

"Yoshi," he caught his breath, "Yoshi doesn't talk."

Ann looked at the boy, and then at Yoshi. Now, that was an embarrassing slip. Best to pretend that it had been a joke, by hammering that joke into the ground. "Well, if you say so. He does have an awfully intelligent face…"

"You're killing me!" he bellowed, and suddenly Doctor McNinja was standing beside him, eyes suspicious.

"Figure of speech!" Ann said quickly, free hand out and fingers spread. "Not threatening anyone, Doctor, really….just here for my appointment. The arm. Right?"

"The arm. Right." McNinja looked oddly undecided, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

"So, how have you been?" he asked, for no apparent reason.

"Um, fine, fine," she said, putting Ghost down at her feet; he promptly sat and stared up at Yoshi, fascinated. "The arm doesn't hurt. I got in to the hospital and had all my meetings with the staff, oh and I got my house mostly set up. It's livable, at least, if not as secure as I'd like."

"Well. That's good," McNinja said, even more uneasily.

"Oh, I did have one fun thing happen today. Fun for me, not for other people. I found the company that 'lost' a tractor-trailer full of my electronic equipment, and went to see them along with my lawyer. And they said Oh no, no idea where it went, no chance it's on our lot, so sorry, will pay penalties…." She sneered. "They obviously opened it up and looked inside, and realized they could sell my gear and pay off the shipping contract and still make a profit."

Ann let her eyes go narrow and very cold. "So I signed off on the breach of contract documents, had everything notarized – I brought a notary too – and then went up to a nice little hill next door, that overlooked their parking facility. And what did I see?" She grinned. "A tractor-trailer right in the middle of the lot getting very, very hot, and starting to melt."

"Melt?" Gordito said.

"Thermite," Ann purred. "If I can't have my property back, I'm not going to let them profit from it." She let her face relax into a more normal expression of glee. "And there's some lovely YouTube footage up of the trailer melting into the asphalt, and coincidentally every other trailer in the lot tilting over or melting open, in circles going outwards." She gestured the destruction with her hands. "Glorious."

"YouTube?" Gordito said, perking up.

She tilted her face to him and whispered, "Do a search for Cumberland, oops, and boom."

"Doesn't thermite usually take more time than that to work?" McNinja asked.

Ann shrugged. "I sent the signal for it to go off two minutes before I arrived – I knew they wouldn't hand it over. And of course, when they re-read the contract, I did warn them what would happen if the shipment was lost. My lawyers told me not to do it, but…I've been having a bad week."

She looked at the Doctor, and considered. "Actually, my lawyers have found out some interesting things, about possible ties between all the companies that lost my furniture, didn't finish setting up my home security, and so on. Tell me, have you heard of a man called King Radical?"

Gordito flinched, and then looked up at McNinja. No reaction, so Gordito elbowed him in the ribs.

"Pssst! That's your cue!" he whispered.

"Oh? Oh….King Radical. Yes, he's the head of the Cumberland Mafia. Wears a crown, rides a dirt bike. Kind of my arch-nemesis. But that's not important right now."

She looked more closely at him. "Sorry?"

McNinja looked glum, like he was going to be delivering some very bad news.

"Is something wrong, Doctor?" she asked again.

"I just talked to my mother," he said stiffly, and Gordito audibly gulped. "She said – that she wants to invite you to dinner. And that she wouldn't take no for an answer."

"Um, okay. Is that bad?" she asked Gordito. "Is she – a bad cook, or something?"

That opened the floodgates, and in a long unbroken string of words Gordito told about the robot animals, and the cave, and the fighting, and the poison, and so forth.

* * *

 

Doc let Gordito spill his guts, feeling acid boil in his own stomach.

"She said she wouldn't poison the food. And that she'd go easy on you," he finally interrupted his sidekick's morbid recital.

"Go easy means – what? Some sort of mock combat, or-?"

"No," he answered heavily. "It means that if you fight very, very well, she might not – you might be able to walk afterwards."

"Oh, I see." Ann's eyes were losing their happy glow. "And I don't suppose I could counter-offer to take her out to dinner somewhere else, where she won't fight me? Cumberland must have some good restaurants-"

"No."

"Couldn't I just not show up? Refuse the invitation?"

"She won't take no for an answer," Doc repeated, looking at her and trying to make it clear that there was nothing he could do about it. "But if you moved out of town…"

"I just got here," she nearly snarled. She lowered her head, looking angry enough to spit.

"You know," she said, looking back up, "I noticed at Memorial Hospital that they had not nearly enough specialists on staff. And so I asked them, rhetorically, if there was a magic GP with a hundred degrees who lived in the woods and took care of everyone."

Doc managed to look smug without changing his expression in the slightest.

"And yes, you guessed it, there was in fact that magic GP. You. But I was unaware," her voice was dropping, colder and colder with each word, "that your status was so high that your mother was allowed to murder random houseguests with impunity."

"Ouch," said Gordito, with sincere appreciation for that verbal punch to the gut.

"No, no, it's not like that. It's just that she thinks we're…we're…"

"We are what?"

"Ah, well, seeing each other." Doc looked down at his feet, embarrassed, and completely missed Gordito mouthing at him, Well are you?

"Should I apologize for having eyes or for being opaque? Doctor, you could just tell her-"

"She told me that a ninja should be more subtle about such things."

Ann rubbed at the side of her face with her hand. "So, the fact that we're not going out is proof that we are going out, because otherwise there'd be no sign we were going out. Tell me, did your mother take any logic courses in school?"

"She's – difficult."

"She sounds it." Ann suddenly hissed between her teeth, and Yoshi hissed back; she waved one hand and the velociraptor subsided. She stared down at the ground, her hair falling over her face. Ghost tilted his head and looked up at her, and whined.

Finally she took a deep breath, and seemed to center herself. When she looked back up at them, her face was calm. "Doctor?" she asked, holding out both her hands. After an uneasy glance at Gordito, Doc took a step forward and placed his hands in hers, feeling the calluses and the little lines of fresh cuts still on them. She looked up at him, and gave an almost wistful smile.

"When someone strikes me with a weapon, Doctor, I do not blame the weapon. I blame the person who struck me."

Doc went to withdraw his hands and her fingers clamped on his, hard. The smile went from wistful to wicked in an instant.

"You are not the one who struck me. It was Mitzi who raised you to be a ninja; it was Mitzi who attacked you and drove you out into the storm to my great discomfort-"

"How do you know that?"

"You said it – or rather you sang it. So, it is Mitzi who has invited me to dinner." Her smile widened, and her voice was almost gloating as she said, "And I accept."

"Oh, no," Gordito breathed.

Ann let go of Doc's hands and stepped away, stroking her chin with a thoughtful expression. Doc was trying not to look horrified; then he stopped trying. He couldn't let her do this. "You can't accept," he said. "Even if she doesn't kill you, she'll make what I did to you look like love taps."

"An interesting choice of phrase, Doctor." She seemed to bask in his distress, her smile now full of secrets. "I will come to dinner on Friday, I think. I will need time to prepare."

"Prepare how?" Doc asked. There was no time for training, no time for anything. Well, maybe there was time enough for him to put together several doses of antidote to his mother's more frequently utilized poisons, and bring them with him. He'd have to come too, if only to haul Ann back to his office to save her life.

She tossed her head. "I'm going to go find myself something pretty to wear, and then not wear it. Instead I think I'll plan on combat armor."

"That could help," Gordito opined.

"However, under the circumstances, and I'm sure your mother will understand Doctor, I would think it would be inappropriate for me to bring a side dish. Got to leave my hands free, after all. Do you agree?"

Finally, regretfully, Doc nodded yes, certain that the stay of Ann Wales in Cumberland was about to come to a bloody end.

Ann turned on her heel and left without another word. Ghost trotted obediently at her heels as she went to her car, with almost a hint of a skip to her step.

"She is so weird. But cool!" Gordito added. "Too bad she's going to die."

"Not if I can help it." But at that moment, he had no idea of what he could do to help.

* * *

 

Doc first realized that Ann might actually stand a chance when he pulled into the picnic spot on the side of the mountain.

Normally, he would have parked inside one of his family's hidden caves, but Mom had been adamant that this stranger not know their secrets until she had proven herself. And Ann had nixed the idea of Doc using chloroform on her, loudly. So they had arranged to meet here, where he could guide her through the obstacles to the McNinja cave.

This was also a great opportunity to talk her out of this crazy idea, or get her lost, or maybe just break her leg and take her back to his office – but if he did any of those things, Mitzi would know. And she would come for Ann, at some unexpected place and time. And that would be worse.

Ann's car was there, with a smudgy dark shadow standing beside it. When he got out and looked closer, the shadow was Ann, wearing a long grey-black mottled coat and black gloves and sensible flat shoes. And she was masked. Not just masked, but masked well; a rough-textured black scarf was wrapped expertly around her head and hair, leaving only a tiny slice of bare skin across her eyes. It wasn't something that most people could do, wrap a mask like that.

He was starting to wonder, a little uneasily, if this was just a very elaborate way for his parents to set him up with another ninja – but that couldn't be it. She wasn't a ninja. But she was – something besides just a normal person.

"Did you bring a weapon?" She didn't appear to be carrying one.

"No, actually," she said, her voice barely muffled by the cloth. As though to prove it, she pulled loose the drawstring on her purse and showed the contents: a bundle of keys, a dog whistle, and a tiny flashlight. "I couldn't think of anything that I fight well enough with. So it's just me." Her eyes narrowed in a smile – strange, seeing her expression just through her eyes now, and reading it the way he did his own family's.

"Shall we go?" she invited, and he turned without a word and stepped over the guardrail, into the brush. She kept up well enough, but he winced at how noisy she was. With every rustling branch or heavy footfall, his knowledge that she was doomed grew.

They were on the plateau now, with the cold wind whipping through the dried-out grass. In the distance was the gentle slope of the mountain, hiding the entrance to the caves.

"Now remember," he told her again, "give me twenty minutes before you come after me. Or she'll think we're fighting as a pair, and then she'll… she'll...."

"Flip out?"

She blinked innocently at his enraged look. "I'll wait here," she said demurely, putting her feet beside each other and staring up at him with her hands clasped in front of her. "Thank you for going first," she said sweetly. "Good luck."

Without a word he turned and ran, his white coat cracking through the air as he moved. He intended to spend those twenty minutes in combat: wearing Mitzi out, even injuring her if he could, so as to give Ann as much of a chance as possible.

Behind him, a lumbering shape rose out of a shallow depression in the soil, and revealed itself to be an unnaturally large bear. It padded back along the Doctor's trail, eyes glowing faintly red in the gloom.


	7. Pour Some Sugar On Me

Of course, going ahead to wear Mitzi out would only work if he could actually find Mitzi.

Doc raged through the cave silently, flicking his sword tip through every crevice and hiding place. Where was she! If he didn't know better, he would think that she wasn't there. Could she have set some trap? Or – more devious – she was waiting at the house for him to arrive, so she could go out and attack their guest all rested and prepared.

His time was almost up. He bowed his head for an instant, shoulders slumped, and wondered if his mother was watching, even now. Then he turned and marched through the darkness, feet moving in reflexive patterns to keep him away from the stalactites. The cave ground was gritty under his shoes, and he kept slowing his steps, waiting to hear some noise, some scream or blow, from behind him. But there was nothing.

Here was the house, looking like any other house you might see on a typical American street, except for being in a cave. And just stepping out of the front door was Doc's brother, Sean – or as he preferred to be called, Dark Smoke Puncher. He was dressed in stark ninja attire, obi-wrapped jacket and breeches, in black and grey from mask to feet; he'd added on a red baseball hat and a gold necklace, in what Doc considered a ridiculous attempt to look 'cool.'

"Yo, bro!"

"Hi, Sean," Doc sighed. "I don't suppose that Mom is here?"

"No, she's in-"

"-the cave. Of course. Damn it," he hissed in frustration, looking over his shoulder with an anguished expression. She must have hidden and he'd missed her completely. And now Ann was going to pay for that, quite possibly in her own blood.

"Hey, um. I – look, Mom's been talking about this Ann, right?

"Unfortunately."

"Well, I thought I might be able to knock her out before she got to the caves, right? So I did some reprogramming of the sentry animals. It wasn't easy, either," Sean continued, warming to his words, gloved hands fluttering like black-and-grey birds in the air. "Dad was watching me, so I had to set up the new parameters in-"

"Did it work?" Doc looked up at his brother on the front steps.

"No." Sean slumped, and walked down to stand on the ground beside Doc, staring into the cave. "I don't know what she did, but she took them all out."

"What, all the animals? Even the bear?"

"She knocked it over like it was straw."

Doc was trying to picture this and having no luck at all. "With what? A gun?" She hadn't appeared to be carrying a weapon.

"No, and that's what's so weird about it. She just throws something at them, and they fall over. But no explosion or electrical overload, just a sudden total mechanical failure."

"Oh, well. Well. Thanks anyway, Sean," Doc said.

"Yeah, well, someday maybe you can run interference for my date."

Doc rolled his eyes. Was everyone in Cumberland in on this romance story except for him and Ann?

"Do you remember the first time Hortense came to dinner?" Dan strolled out on the porch, the very image of a contented ninja man of the house. Even his gray moustache looked smoother than usual, poking through his mask.

"Yes, Dad, I do," Doc sighed. He and Hortense had broken up, a long time ago, but that never stopped his parents from trying to get them back together.

"She and Mitzi were out there for six hours, dodging and hiding and sneaking," Dan went on familiarly. "They finally came in, just giggling at each other. Giggling! I couldn't even remember when I'd last heard your mother giggle like that."

"I was hungry," Doc remembered aloud. Also nervous. "And I'm hungry now."

Dan stood a little straighter, his blue eyes raking both his sons; they stood straighter in turn, unconsciously. "Well, there's no help for that," Dan snapped. "It hopefully won't be too long before we can - eat….."

His words trailed off, and then they all heard it. Footsteps, in the cave. Running footsteps, but not Mitzi, whose tread was familiar to all of them. This was someone running slower, weaving clumsily through the cave's rocks and stalactites, and then the runner came into view.

It was Ann Wales. Running, gloved fists pumping at her sides, eyes wide in the slit of her mask. She saw the house and started running flat out. She covered the distance in long bounding steps and then she leaped, coat and skirts flying, an unforgettable stretch of bare sweating thigh above her stocking soaring past Doc's widened eyes, and she spun in mid-air like a falling cat and landed on the front door.

She landed, not hit: landed on feet and elbows and hands, back to the door and ready to kick off or attack. It was a maneuver worthy of an acrobat - or a ninja.

"Safe!" she said, dropping to the porch. She stepped forward and scanned their masked faces worriedly. "Or is it base? Safe on base? Doctor….?"

"Safe," he said, his voice a little scratchy in his throat. Ann smiled, eyes narrowing, and then her eyes turned to the other two present.

"Good evening," she said warmly, stepping down to stand in front of them. Doc watched, fascinated; she hadn't walked so much as she had flowed down the steps, moving with the grace of a ballet dancer. Where in hell had that come from? "You must be Daniel McNinja. A pleasure to meet you, sir."

"Well, thank you," Dan said, taking her extended hand and apparently finding her grip sufficiently enthusiastic.

Doc's thoughts were darting all over the place. She couldn't have fought Mitzi, she'd be wounded. So she'd snuck past Mitzi? Impossible. Ann wasn't a ninja, she couldn't have beaten Mitzi in a fight. And she didn't move like someone who had been fighting.

"And Dark Smoke Puncher," she said, turning her eyes to Doc's brother. Her posture changed again: more open and relaxed. "The creator of those awesome robots."

"Awesome?" he wondered.

She let go of his hand and gave him an enthusiastic thumbs-up gesture. "Wonderful machines! I really hated to damage them, but – well, that was the rule. Right?" Her eyes flickered to Dan and then back to his younger son. "Oh, may I ask if you'll be retrieving the robots and breaking them down for repairs, or working on them in situ?"

"In what?"

"Are you going to move them before you repair them?"

"Maybe, why?"

"Well…without wanting to give away any of my secrets, you should handle them very, very carefully."

"Explosives?" Dan asked, raising his chin.

"No, no," she spread her hands reassuringly. "I would just recommend that you use non-conductive, nonmetallic tools. And treat them as though they have a fair amount of fight still in them."

"I don't get it," Sean complained. "Everything went dead: the motors, the sensors, everything. What could they do now?"

She held out one hand to him, palm out, and curled in her first two fingers. "Do you want to be known as Two Fingers Puncher?" she asked.

"Uh….no?"

"Then be careful, please. For both our sakes. I'd hate to see you hurt on my account."

Doc coughed and bore his father's sharp glance without flinching. That was just such a painfully gracious thing to say, to someone who'd just sicced a bunch of robot animals on her. His opinion of Ann's nerve was going up by the minute.

Ann peeled out of her gloves and neatly shrugged off her long coat and draped it over one arm, then touched her covered cheek with her free hand. "Before I forget, sir – would you like me to leave this mask on?"

Dan blinked at her, shocked. The McNinja family never unmasked, not except in the most dire situations.

"I don't usually cover my face," she clarified. "But this is your house, and your rules apply. And after all, you did dress up for me."

Doc had met people who were intimidated by ninjas; he rarely met someone who thought that ninjas were amusing. But something about the way Ann said 'dress up' made him think that she was snickering on the inside. Please, please, don't let her start snickering out loud….

"Well," Dan rumbled, almost visibly thinking, "seems a shame not to see our guest…Let's have it off, then."

Ann giggled, and Doc groaned.

"Dad!" he said reprovingly. His father had a deaf ear for double entendres, and always had.

Ann just giggled again, unwinding her scarf with quick flicks of her fingers. "You McNinja men are so forward," she almost purred, and now it was Sean's turn to groan.

"Oh, geez," he said, looking at his brother with an appalled expression.

"Hey!" Doc said indignantly, as Ann's scarf floated to her shoulders. She stared back at them, bare-faced, looking very pleased with herself. She wore no makeup, so far as Doc could see; she'd combed her hair, but that was it. No jewelry, not so much as a hairpin of metal about her; a long dark skirt almost to the ground, black sensible shoes, and a dark red knit shirt, high-necked, that looked like evening wear only because there was a narrow open slit in the material, just above the level of her breasts, that shifted with every breath.

She should have looked harmless. She didn't. Her attention was as focused as a laser, her expression grimly delighted. Her posture was perfectly balanced. She looked ready to fight the lot of them or spend the night twisting them around her little finger. Or maybe both things at once.

"And what a nice house you have," she said, turning and admiring it. "It's much larger than mine. And it's so quiet here in the caves." She sighed. "Now I almost wish I'd built a house in a cave too. One with all the amenities. Doctor, do you have a full surgery down here?"

"What? Oh no, no, that's all back at the office," he said.

Her expression grew suddenly puzzled. "But you do have medical supplies here, right? Enough for any emergency?"

"My wife's a big fan of echinacea," Dan said dismissingly. "I can't remember when any of us had as much as a cold."

"But…but you do have some supplies, right?" She looked imploringly at Doc, who frowned back at her.

"A few Band-Aids, maybe, and a little Bacitracin…" His voice trailed off at her expression.

Ann looked horrified; her face white, her fingers trembling as she raised her hand to her lips. "Oh no," she said, staring past them, into the outer cave. The cave where Mitzi had been lying in wait for her guest, and had not appeared, to either concede defeat or attack again.

Ann's voice was thick with fear as she whispered, "What have I done?"

 

* * *

"Mitzi," Dan said in a strangled tone, and vanished into the darkness, ninja-swift. Doc was at his heels, a fluttering spot of white in the darkness and gone. "Mom?" came his voice from the distance.

"What?" asked Dark Smoke Puncher, and then almost cringed as Ann leaned close to him. She – she'd done something to Mom! Nobody beat Mom, but this stranger had, and what the hell was he supposed to do now?

"She's fine," Ann said urgently.

"What?" he asked again.

"Your mom; she's fine. I never touched her."

"Oh my God. You just – bluffed my Dad and my brother – oh man. Oh man!" He bent over and drummed his hands on his knees in a fury of delight, laughing silently, and looked up only at the touch of Ann's hand on his shoulder.

She grinned at him. "Now, before they get back, why don't you show me around the house? Tell me about it. For starters, since it's in a cave, why is there a roof on it?"

Dark Smoke Puncher started to tell the history of the McNinja family in the area, walking back into the house, and Ann followed after him like an attentive, slightly dangerous shadow.

 

* * *

Mitzi was waiting, a darkness in the darkness. Breathing silently and smoothly, she waited for her prey to come within reach. In her black-gloved hands, her sais rested like two hands of a clock where the only time was Death.

It had not pleased her to wait here, moving the slightest amount possible in order to evade her son's detection. She had trained him as a ninja, and instead he had become…a doctor? And now this woman, with no background, no history among the ninja, and whether or not she was dating her son, Mitzi intended to hurt her enough that she would never willingly lay eyes on the Doctor again.

She waited, still silent. It was starting to get close to when dinner should be served. She wondered: perhaps Miss Wales had backed out, fled, a coward? That would make for some pleasantly scathing conversations over dinner. And perhaps she could mention that-

A noise. Footsteps. But they weren't coming from outside the caves, or from the entrance; they were coming from the direction of the house. The footsteps sounded like – her husband, and her son. But it couldn't be. There was no reason for them to come here; they wouldn't dare interrupt her in battle. If it was a trick, it was a very good one. It sounded like-

She dropped to one knee and lunged, her whole body a single straight line with the sai its deadly tip. Her blow was deflected and hard strong arms were around her. Dan's arms.

"Mitzi, Mitzi!" he half-shouted.

The Doctor's hands were suddenly there as well, on her shoulders. "Mom? Are you are all right? I need you to come back to the house, I need to-"

"All right? Of course I'm all right!" she snapped, stepping out of her husband's embrace with a twist and turning to the sound of the Doctor's voice. "And there's no sign of your Miss Wales."

"She's at the house," said Dan, impossibly.

"What?" she asked. "She can't be. I never – she didn't-"

"She's there," her son confirmed.

Mitzi felt her wrath suddenly rise to a whole new level. "She got past me? And you left her there? With Dark Smoke Puncher?"

Without another word she ran, driving towards the house lights. Behind her came the cold steel slithering of a drawn sword, as her husband and son followed in her wake. She would have to chastise the Doctor about that, he was being very noisy-

The door, half-open; she hit it and was inside and scanning the room in an instant, feeling the presence of others here in her house.

"Hello," said a strange blonde woman, coming out of the next room with her youngest son at her heels.

Mitzi moved smoothly closer, judging, preparing. The woman's shoulders and arms were muscular under the tight red shirt, and her shoes had cave-dust on them. Her fingers were cut and battered and hung perfectly relaxed at her sides. Her expression was one of mild interest, her purse was not angled to throw or for her to reach inside it, and she did not stand as though she was armed.

"Your house is very nice," the woman, it must be Ann Wales but how was she here, how had she gotten in? "I love the training area."

Mitzi's eyes promised death to her youngest son, who at least had the good sense to look away. Then she looked back at her guest, her eyes full of death and worse than death. Her sais were ready as she stepped closer, closer, until they were nearly close enough to touch toes, until the entire field of her vision was filled with her enemy's face, blue eyes looking perfectly innocent.

There was a long pause. Mitzi was here in her home, with her family around her, and by all rights she should have felt supremely confident that she could destroy this intruder with no more effort than crushing some venomous insect. But Miss Wales just looked at her, relaxed and calm, a faint smile on her lips.

"You have very thick eyelashes," she said peaceably, and smiled a little wider, and did absolutely nothing else.

The pause returned, stretching on and on. And unbelievably, it was Mitzi who finally broke.

"I'll go get ready to serve," she snapped, turning on her heel and flicking into the kitchen, ninja-swift. She looked at the oven and the counters and the photos on the walls as though they were alien artifacts, something belonging to another woman, a strong ninja woman who feared no opponent.

Mitzi McNinja did not fear Ann Wales. No, and she never would. But her first and strongest impression of her guest was that she was not afraid of the McNinja family, either. And that made her wonder, just for a moment, if perhaps her eldest son had made a good choice for once.


	8. Under Pressure

The family sat down to dinner in silence, all of them watching Mitzi as she laid out the dishes with just a little too much precision. The McNinjas watched her every gesture with some alarm; Ann Wales' eyes followed her with the same mild, appreciative gaze that she had been wearing since Mitzi arrived. There was no bread on the table, to Doc's relief; one less thing that Mitzi could poison. Just because she'd said that she wouldn't poison their guest didn't mean that she might not poison one or all of the rest of her family – just to keep them on their toes.

Ann dropped her napkin across her lap, sipped from her water glass, and slid her hand onto Doc's thigh. He tensed, and wondered if she could feel it. Of course she could. He was wondering how to pull her hand off without making it obvious to his parents when she started tracing her fingers over his leg. No, one finger: she was writing on him.

HI, she wrote. I.AM.OK, tapping her finger against him for the spaces between words.

He took her hand and firmly moved it off his thigh, and she turned her fingers in his grip and wrote on his palm, R.U.OK

YES, he wrote back, then let go of her hand and took a sip of water himself. This was dangerous, and she didn't know how dangerous. If Mom thought there really was something between him and Ann….

"Would you like to serve, Miss Wales?" Dan said, offering her the serving spoon.

'Thank you, sir," she said, taking the spoon and sectioning the fish fillet on the platter in front of her into flakes with precisely graceful strokes, every movement as neat as a machine and as smooth as a swan sailing across the water. Without watching what her hands were doing, she looked at Sean and asked, "So, are your robots using an automated gait algorithm, or a naturalistic model?"

Sean's eyes widened with an expression perilously close to adoration. "Oh, well, I vary it based on the terrain, energy consumption patterns, light cycles-"

"Fat lot of good your robots did, boy," Dan growled at his younger son, and cutting a withering look at Ann. Sean hunched over defensively.

"No, not at all," Ann disagreed. "I spent lots of time figuring out how to get past them." She smiled into Dan's eyes. "They were definitely the most difficult challenge of attending dinner."

Smoothly, she turned her head and looked at Sean, her eyes skimming past Mitzi as though she was not there – and seething.

"And are you storing the gait local to each unit, or centrally broadcasting it?" Her spoon had finished flicking at the serving platter, and she scooped up Dan's plate with a swooping gesture and placed a neat spiral of fish-flakes on it with delicate care. He stared at the spiral, puzzled; it was arranged as precisely as origami, and almost looked too artistic to eat.

While she continued talking about pace strategies and energy conversation, Ann somehow crafted a neat fish-flake flower for Mitzi's plate, and another spiral for Dark Smoke Puncher, and a sort of half-flower for Doc's plate. Half-flower, or-?

He picked up his fork and quickly muddled her arrangement, and then glared at her. She did not return his gaze; instead her hand darted to his under the table, and spelled OBGYN in his palm before retreating.

Ann's serving of fish for herself was another flower, but half the size of theirs, and she waved away Dan's proffered scoop of potatoes. "No thank you," she said, "I prefer to eat one dish at a time. And besides, I'm not blessed with your athletic lifestyles. I have to eat more sparingly. And I'm definitely saving room for those pickled beets," she said, casting a lingering look at the heavy crock from which the beets' unmistakable (and nearly unbearable) smell rose.

Dan passed the potatoes over to Doc, and asked, "So what do you do, Miss Wales?"

"Ann, please. I'm a computer database strategist; I've been hired by Memorial Hospital to normalize their data storage architecture. It's part of a ten-year plan to put all American hospitals on a congruent data entry and retrieval system."

Most of this had apparently gone in Dan's ear and out the other. "Ten years?"

"Well, not to say that I'll be on it for ten years, necessarily. But it's very important work. Tens of thousands of people suffer and die every year, hundreds of thousands of labor-hours are wasted, because of incompatible systems. Say, Doctor," she turned to him and smiled, "I should come to your office and examine your back end processes some time."

His glare this time was hot enough to ignite the air, but she only kept smiling; it was probably just his imagination that she wiggled an eyebrow at him. Dark Smoke Puncher choked on a giggle, muffling it with a mouthful of potato.

"Did you study computers in America?" Mitzi said a little too lightly.

"Here and in Wales."

"You're from Wales, and your last name is Wales?"

"No, my original last name is Chwydiad," she said dismissingly. "I never liked it, and I changed it when I became a US citizen."

"And what does your family do?" Mitzi's fork and knife had not been touched; she sat with her food cooling in front of her, hands on the table, staring at her guest with eyes like coal.

"Oh. Well," Ann took a quick bite of fish and swallowed, "I'm the youngest of five sisters, you see. The other four all married very well, and they send my parents money."

"And – that's it?"

"That's it. They have a house. Oh, they have – art, I guess. Art and stuff. They like art," Ann offered a little desperately, seeming confused by Mitzi's expression. "We," Ann's eyes suddenly went cold, "we haven't been in contact for some years."

Mitzi raised her eyebrows. "And was that your idea or theirs?"

"Both," Ann said coolly. "We just couldn't see eye to eye anymore. I was disappointed that they focused my entire education on domestic duties, and they were disappointed that I never came home with a suitable husband."

"That is so weird," Sean said

"Is it?" She glanced at him, still a little puzzled. Then she shrugged. "I thought it rather charming, in hindsight: their determination to make me learn all the traditional woman's roles. Wanting them preserved in living memory, instead of vanishing as they became obsolete. Technology is replacing so many of the things of the past. It's sad when the old things fade away…."

She let her voice trail off while she served herself a tiny portion of potato (which again was placed directly in the center of her plate). Both her hands were out of his reach, so Doc wrote SHUT UP on her leg. The way Dan's moustache was bristling, the way his mom's brows were drawing down, they had clearly figured out that they were the old things that Ann thought were sadly fading away.

Ann ate a forkful of potato, smiled appreciatively at the taste, and wrote JOKE on Doc's palm.

NO, he wrote back.

"So," Mitzi said, finally plucking a petal from her fish with her fork and eating it, "how did you and the Doctor meet?"

"A tree fell on him during the ice storm, and I decided to pull him out from under it."

"A tree? A tree?" Dan's laugh was gravelly. "A ninja defeated by a tree?"

"Well, rather than fell, perhaps I should say was pushed down on him by ghosts. Ghosts who made sure that the tree also pinned him in several feet of ice water."

That seemed to set Dan back a bit; Mitzi on the other hand was not affected at all.

"And you couldn't get free?" Mitzi's words cut as sharp as her eyes.

"I was suffering from hypothermia-" Doc defended himself.

"You were drunk." That in a voice of doom.

"And who drove him into that storm, drunk and unprepared?" Ann snapped.

"A ninja is ready for any battle!" Mitzi blazed suddenly, sweat standing out on her brow. The temperature around the table certainly seemed to have gone up, and fast.

"You should be grateful that I was the one who found him," Ann said, frowning. "I'd heard about the Doctor, of course; he's famous. If it had been any other ninja, I would have killed him as a matter of course. Or her," she added, staring back at Mitzi with a gentle smile.

An exquisitely uncomfortable silence descended. Doc felt keen embarrassment; Ann couldn't kill a ninja, she shouldn't talk like she could…but….

"Oh come on," she looked pityingly at them, "my power goes out and there's a ninja right there, I'm not going to think he – or she – is coming over to borrow a cup of sugar. No, if it had been any of you," she gestured with her water glass, "I would have waited for the hypothermia to really set in, and then just waded in with a shovel and taken your head off."

"My head?" Sean said, one hand rising to his neck.

"Always best to make sure," she said, smiling now at his distress. "And then I'd have to decide how to get rid of the body. Hmm. Hmmm.…"

JOKE her fingers wrote on Doc's palm, and he tried to write back SHUTUP, but his fingers stuttered (now that was weird) and he thought he wrote something like SUTUI which made no sense at all.

"I suppose if you're anything like your brother," she deliberately pinched Doc's bicep to watch him not flinch, his jaw muscles twitching under his mask, "you probably have some very good meat on your bones. I could have pot roast all winter long."

Doc turned to her, glaring, while Sean made a horrified noise in the back of his throat. "You're going to, what, put me in your freezer and eat me?"

Doc was still realizing the double entendre of 'good meat' and 'bones' and wasn't quite paying attention.

"No, no, of course not!" Ann giggled, briskly spearing a piece of potato and eating it. "You never leave the body onsite. No, a nice storage facility with onsite electricity, and a freezer, and lax monitoring systems…" Her voice trailed off as she met four ninja's glares at once.

Then she burst out laughing, hand covering her mouth. "Man, if I pulled your legs any harder they would come right off. Excuse me," she looked down and got her laughing under control. "I can't believe you believed that….Fortunately, it's only a theoretical situation, right? Because I'm not going to have any uninvited ninjas creeping about my property, now am I?"

She smiled at Mitzi, and ate another piece of potato.

"It is an offense to the honor of a ninja to be defeated by a tree," Mitzi almost gloated. She was anticipating many long years of tormenting Doc about his little accident.

Ann's smile twisted into something darker, and she gently tapped one of her palms against her ear, as though something was interfering with her hearing. "I'm sorry, but I was under the impression that a ninja was an assassin by stealth: backstabbing, treachery, lies, deceit, even poison. Someone who cannot even be trusted to show their face. So I really don't see how a ninja, by definition, could have any honor at all."

That remark landed in the conversation like a slap in all their masked faces.

Ann titled her head, and her neck audibly cracked. "No, that's not quite right: a person can possess personal honor that has nothing to do with their being a ninja. There's a quote I am thinking of, about honor and reputation. Bujold. She said that reputation is what other people know about you, and honor is what you know about yourself."

The words hung in the air, but instead of obscuring the table it made everything seem razor-sharp. The tension in the room pressed hard against their skins, and only Ann seemed immune to its effects.

"Now as to reputation – what other people know, or believe they know, about ninja is not something that you or I have control over. But speaking only for myself, if someone suggested to me that my honor depended on what they thought of me or my actions, I would invite them to-" do something so vilely repulsive, so blasphemously disgusting, that Doc actually felt his gut twitch in sympathy from one end to the other.

Gross, he thought to himself, trying to not think about what she had just said and instead thinking about it all the harder. Oh, gross, SO gross….

"Ooh, I like that second part," said Dan, who apparently hadn't thought the insult all the way through. "Is that a quote too?"

"No, sir, it's an original. You may use it, if you like. But I wouldn't use it in mixed company if I were you."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Think about it."

Dan did, and his pupils suddenly shrank. "Oh," and then his eyes flickered to Mitzi. She was still staring at Ann, pale under her mask, eyes huge with fury.

"And what would your family, the ones who educated you so carefully, say about you using that sort of language?" Mitzi finally said, almost hissing her words.

Ann looked off into space. "They'd probably pour boiling water into my mouth until they thought I'd been scalded enough to know better." She rotated her tongue in one cheek, and then leaned away from Doc as he suddenly moved close. He ignored her move, cupping her jaw in his hand and looking closer – there were scars, tiny scars around her lips, he'd thought they were just the marks of age but they were really-

"Doctor, please don't grab me like that in front of your family," Ann said; she was leaning so far away that she was practically in Dan's lap. Then she leaned back towards him, eyes suddenly hot. "Of course, if you want to grab me in private-"

He flinched away from her, and that was it; he could tell that everyone had seen that flinch, and that they all knew, for certain, that he was not interested in her. And that her flirting with him was just a joke. So there. It was over.

(You're an idiot, his inner voice growled, and fell silent)

Ann settled back into her seat just a little bit too obviously, glanced around the table at everyone's expressions of uncertainty. "And now - time for beets!"

She served herself a neat little stack of the beets, again precisely centered in the middle of her plate. She ate them one slice at a time, accompanied with such statements as, "Well, that's definitely picked," and "I think this one's double-pickled," and so on. And the McNinja family sat around her, frozen, waiting for her to finish, or for Mitzi to explode in sheer fury, or both.

"All done!" Ann tilted up her beet-stained plate and showed it to the table at large. "Thanks you for the lovely meal. Would you like me to help clear the table, ma'am?"

Mitzi leaned back in her chair, at last, and dropped her head. "No," she said to the tablecloth. "I'll do it."

Her gaze lashed back up, catching her husband and her eldest son in a grip of steel. "And you will help me," she commanded.

"Sure thing, Mom," Doc said, picking up his plate and then Ann's. Dan rose and started to clean up as well, and Ann said something about getting out of the way and drifted into the living room with Dark Smoke Puncher following her.

* * *

 

In the kitchen, it was silent. Mitzi put the plates down with a bit too much precision, and carefully took Ann's plate away from Doc and set it to one side. Doc's eyes went from the plate to his mom, and then back. Could she have-?

"That woman," Mitzi said, in a voice of tolling doom, "is not here by chance."

Dan and Doc stared at her with almost identical expressions of confusion.

Mitzi's hands were in fists at her sides as she glared at the dirty pots as though they were personal enemies. "Isn't it obvious? She uses the Doctor as a way to get invited here-"

"Mom, there was a tree-"

"Mitzi, you invited her-"

She ignored both their interjections. "-she gets right through our defenses. And she sits here at my table, and talks about technology and honor, flaunting herself in all our faces! Defying us, calling us honorless! But who is she? Who sent her here? How did she get past me?!"


	9. I Love Rock'N'Roll

Dark Smoke Puncher was confused. He didn't know what to say to this stranger now – she'd completely slaughtered Mitzi over dinner, and had barely raised her voice in the process. Maybe it would be safest to just talk about the robots – well, the things about the robots that were safe to talk about. He hoped he hadn't said too much already.

He considered: there was a simplified version of the robot control system running on his personal PC, he could show her that. But when they stepped into his room and he turned off the screensaver, she hissed through her teeth like one of the mechanical serpents outside.

"Oh," Ann breathed, staring at his screen; it showed a field of frost-tipped shamrocks. "Oh, I know this."

"Really? I found it online-"

"No, no, no I know this, I know you!" She turned to him and pointed one slightly shaking finger at his chest. "I know you, we're on the same sites, your screen name on Gamer Central is Hiro Protagonist! You play Flight to Heaven, you're the top scorer!"

"I – how – what makes you think that?" His tongue seemed to be tying itself in knots, and he was much too aware that Ann was standing in the same room with him, the way her skirt pulled tighter across one hip than the other, the narrow slash across the front of her shirt opening and closing a little too fast with her breathing.

"How do I know?" She gave a harsh laugh and threw her arms wide. "I'm the author, man! I wrote Flight to Heaven!"

"You did? You don't look like-" and then he bit his tongue.

"Humph. In the real world, not all women who know computers look like Matrix characters." Ann looked down at herself for an instant. "If you put me into a black vinyl bodysuit, I'd look like a hippo. But I did design that game, I paid for the code to be written that I couldn't write, I released it, and you – you are the top scorer. And oh," she leaned alarmingly close, "I could just kiss your mother for inviting me here. I've been looking for you."

Her smile faded as he leaned back from her, holding out his hands. "Whoa, lady, I think you got the wrong guy," he said. He couldn't see how she could have figured out who he was.

"I was on chat with you last night – that's how I saw your desktop," she said, earnestly, her eyes never leaving his. "We talked about the blue control button sticking when the plane was inverted, and I explained about the centrifugal effect, right?"

"I – you could have been monitoring the chat," he countered weakly, and she saw his weakness and drove in.

"You were asking if there was another level to the game." And then she waited, and waited.

He finally fell, or maybe rose to her bait. "Yeah?"

She wiggled her eyebrows smugly. "Go on, log in and I'll show you." She politely turned her eyes to the ceiling while he tapped at the keyboard, then she was suddenly behind him, her head beside his, and her chest must be right there behind his shoulder, if he could just turn his head and look he would be able to see right down her shirt-

"The second panel, there. Destination. Type in H-O-R-A-N-C-K-K."

He did, and the controls on the screen suddenly changed. Those two banks of controls that were always dark lit up, and a stream of burbling chatter came over the headphones.

"What's-"

"You'll find out when you get there. Now fly! Go for it!" She slapped his shoulder, and he glanced back at her – he could see down her shirt all right, and there was no bra in sight – and then back at the screen. He touched the keyboard, set the virtual controls, and he was off.

And while he flew his computer plane through his computer world, Ann Wales watched him play with an expression of interest shading into outright hunger.

* * *

"Go watch her," Mitzi finally ordered the Doctor, and he shrugged angrily and stalked off. Mitzi returned to her fretting, turning over and over in her mind what could have happened, who this person could really be.

"We could just ask her," Dan said, again, and Mitzi ignored him. He fiddled with his hands for a moment, and finally started putting away some of the seasonings that Mitzi had left out. She let him, seeming to be completely engrossed in her own reflection in a serving spoon.

"Who?" she asked herself.

"Salt!" Dan barked, shaking a bottle at her. She blinked and pulled herself back to reality.

"Salt who?"

"The Dark Arts, that has to be it. She bewitched you! Where are the silver salts?"

* * *

"Someone's coming!" Dark Smoke Puncher hissed, shoving away from the computer and turning off the monitor with one motion, rising to his feet. Then he froze: he wasn't supposed to play games after dinner, he wasn't supposed to be alone with guests, and when had the door to his room closed? This was bad, so bad-

"Quick!" Ann flicked away her purse, and it landed with a thump in the corner of the room. "Dance!" And with no more warning that that, she was dancing, hands chopping the air in front of her, bobbing her head to a silent beat.

He paused for almost half a second, and then he joined in. Sure, Mom, we were just dancing. No, Dad, I wasn't on the computer. What could he say, how could he explain-

The door opened and it wasn't his mom or his dad. It was his brother. Doc just stood there, wide-eyed, watching them dance. They both just kept dancing, and then Ann turned in place and started dancing at Doc, shaking her shoulders, grinning with her eyes alight, almost challenging him to join in. She slowed and then sped up, feet drumming on the carpet, arms pumping, her every gesture and breath seeming to scream at Doc to move, to hear the beat, to move, to dance-

For a long moment Doc just stood there, and then something in him snapped. And he flicked out his fingers, raised his knees, and he danced.

Dark Smoke Puncher had been trained to fight underwater; to fight wearing a gag that cut his air to a trickle; to fight with his mouth filled with sand. He'd never been taught how to dance when he was about to bust a gut with laughter, but his previous training did help.

Because his brother was dancing, all elbows and jerky awkward gestures, throwing himself into it, and Ann was dancing with him, meeting his every move with one of her own, and they both looked like complete idiots and they looked like they were having so much fun that they just kept dancing along. She turned one shoulder and split her attention, and soon all three of them were dancing together, laughing with the sheer ridiculous fun of it.

When had he last seen Doc laugh – laugh at just being happy, laugh just for fun? He didn't even remember. He'd sometimes thought that his brother must only laugh when he was fighting. But he could laugh, he could be happy, he was happy, and if Doc could find someone to dance with, someone who would laugh with him, then maybe there was someone out there for Dark Smoke Puncher as well-

A dark shadow suddenly filled the doorway. Dan McNinja stood there, staring at the three dancers, who paused almost as one and stared back.

Ann put down her foot which was hanging in the air. Doc cleared his throat.

"Miss Wales, put your hands where I can see them. Put them out," Dan growled, holding a small glass container in one hand.

Ann looked puzzled. "Excuse me?"

Dan loomed forward, his furious gaze going to his sons. He ordered rather than said, "One of you. Hold-"

She made a little noise in her throat, not quite a growl, and they all froze.

That noise, and the sudden set of her shoulders, the way her eyes darted over the three men looking for weak points, made it absolutely clear that if any of them laid a hand on her, she would fight them. That challenge was enough to hold them all still for a breath.

Ann moved first. With slow care, she held out her hands, palms up, in front of Dan. The little red dashes of cuts still showed over her hands. Doc and Dark Smoke Puncher locked eyes behind her head, both of them visibly wondering what the hell their father was doing.

"Silver salts!" Dan cried, pouring a long swatch of powder across Ann's palms. The white crystals drifted between her fingers and onto the floor, and she stood perfectly immobile, not even seeming to breathe.

"And – holy water!" Dan snapped, sprinkling the same across her wrists.

Nothing happened. The water dripped down her skin, and formed little clots in the salt in her hands. That was all.

Then her hands moved. Slowly, carefully, she brought her hands together and wrung them, hard; they could hear the rasping of the salt between her palms.

When she opened her hands, her fingers were dotted with blood from her opened cuts.

"I think we've rubbed enough salt into each others' wounds for tonight," she finally said, in a voice so throttled with rage it sounded half-dead. She turned on her heel, and gravely shook Doc's hand. "Thank you for a unique evening, Doctor." She turned again, and gently bumped fists with Dark Smoke Puncher. "See you online," she winked.

She turned, picked her purse up and tucked it under her arm, and glared at Dan. Glaring, she marched towards him, marched past him, stepping over the salt scattered on the rug as though it was no barrier at all. She paused in the doorway, head high, and surveyed the three ninjas with a look that could have split hairs.

"Sir," she finally allowed, and then marched out of sight.

"Damn," Dan said regretfully, staring at the empty bottles in his hand. "Waste of good salt-"

"Damn is right, Dad! What did you think you were doing?" Doc looked ready to burst, eyes popping, fists clenched. "You – did you just accuse her of using the Dark Arts to get in here?!"

"Well I thought she had! It was the only thing that made sense!"

"Ma'am," came an icy voice in the distance.

"Wait." That was Mitzi, and her distinct voice sounded almost tremulous. "Miss Wales – are you seeing my son?"

Dark Smoke Puncher held his breath.

"Only with my eyes, ma'am." A pause that was somehow grim. "And sometimes I think I regret even that."

They all stood still, listening as her feet went to the front door and away. They listened for the tiny sounds that would mean Mitzi was breaking all her own rules and attacking a guest on the way out…but there was nothing but the steady clinking of the dishwasher being loaded.

"Well, don't just stand there, boy! Go after her!"

Doc stared at his father with an expression of total bewilderment, and Dark Smoke Puncher was just as confused. What was he talking about?

"As long as someone like that can get into our caves, our family is vulnerable." Dan looked impossibly stern and bleak at once. "So go after her, find out how she did it. Compromise her honor, hell, compromise your honor! Go after her!" and Dan literally shoved Doc towards the front door.

Then he turned and glared at Dark Smoke Puncher. "And you – get ready to salvage your little tin-toys, and pray that you can find a way to make them good enough that we don't have more people strolling into our caves like it was a walk in the park!" He left, and closed the door too firmly behind him.

When the door closed, a little piece of paper fluttered down, from where it had been tucked into the door's hinges. Dark Smoke Puncher looked at it - a plain white business card, with the words CADDIS AIRWAYS printed across it, and a phone number. And a note on the back: Piloting job. Interested? Call me – Ann.

His hand shook, and suddenly he dropped the card and dashed to the bathroom, clutching his stomach. There was no doubt about it: the churning in his guts, the dizziness, the shortness of breath.

He was in love.


	10. You Shook Me All Night Long

Doc moved through the cave, following the muffled sound of Ann's footsteps. She was singing under her breath: a tune from Winnie the Pooh, but with some slightly different words.

"Oh, a wonderful thing is a ninja; a ninja's a wonderful thing. Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of – ouch!" That was accompanied by the faint smack of flesh on stone.

She sighed in the darkness, and then spoke. "If someone is following me, you might want to look away. I'm turning on a flashlight."

Doc slipped behind a boulder, watching the dim glow of the light come on and then move away through the cave. He followed, wondering if he should catch up and turn it off before she reached the cave mouth – but he didn't have to. As soon as the first stars came into view, she turned off the light and started moving faster, out over the dry riverbed, then into the grass and running easily.

He ran behind her, matching her pace. The stars glowed overhead, silent and perfect in their distant coldness. The faint flutter of the grass stems against her feet was the loudest sound: that and the sudden thrashing, creaking noise that seemed to erupt from their path. She jumped high; he saw her body outlined against the night sky for a moment. Then she landed on her feet, and kept running.

He detoured around the thrashing noise, then stopped and went back. It was a robot goat that appeared to driving its own chin into its side. It creaked and kicked, unable to move, somehow locked into a robot bow knot.

"What did she do to you?" he asked, and then backed off and started to run again, letting his longer legs eat up the space between them. But when he finally caught up to her, she had stopped. She was standing, dusky black coat straight to the ground, her re-masked face buried in her gloved hands, and little shivers radiating almost visibly from her.

He hoped she wasn't crying. She probably wasn't crying. What did she have to cry about? She was alive – for now. That is, if Mitzi hadn't poisoned the food.

Ann finally took her face out of her hands, and looked around a little wet-eyed. She stared at him for about ten seconds, squinting, before asking, "Is that you, Doctor? Sorry, my night vision's terrible."

"It's me," and she visibly relaxed.

"I – that was more stressful than I thought it would be. For a few minutes there it felt like dinner with my family." Ann's eyes were wide in the darkness, and he didn't think it was just from trying to see; she seemed to be looking at something terrible in her memories.

Maybe he should distract her, maybe that would help. "What did you do to that back there?" Doc asked, jerking his hand towards the trail to the cave and the thrashing robot goat still rolling around on it.

"The animals?" She waved her hand. "Magnets. Very expensive, very strong magnets. Crunched them up big-time, blew all their servos, threw off their balance."

"Magnets? Really?"

"Really. Good thing you didn't ask me to stand back-to-back with you, Doctor; I was carrying them on a string down my shirt, and we would have ended up stuck together. Very embarrassing."

She changed the subject. "So, that was the infamous McNinja family. You look like Mitzi, you know."

Nobody had ever said that to him. He wondered if that meant she thought he was good-looking, or not, and couldn't decide.

"Not in coloration," she went on thoughtfully. "You've definitely got that from your father. But you have her bone structure; so does your brother. The men must run to tall on her side of the family." She smiled up at his confusion. "So tell me, did I offend everyone hard enough that I won't be invited back?"

Doc suddenly felt relief wash over him. Ann Wales hadn't just been randomly flailing around to upset everyone; she'd had a plan after all.

"I think so," he allowed, a little cautious. Maybe he could convince Ann to – all he had to do is convince her to stay the hell away from his family, and from him, and everything would be hunky-dory.

"Well, I did my best," she sighed. "I threatened to eat your brother, after all. And just to make a mess of that dating rumor, I flirted with you, and your mom, and your dad-"

"My dad?"

She grinned. "He has very shapely knees."

Doc pictured Ann with one hand on his leg, and one hand on his Dad's – no, don't picture that!

He went to a slightly safer topic. "How would flirting with me make my Mom think we weren't dating?"

"Because if she thinks I'm just a flirt who makes passes at everyone, she won't take the rumors seriously." She shook out the folds of her coat. "Nice job flinching away, too. Anyway. Are you going to show me the way back, or do I need to work it out on my own?" She waved a hand in front of his eyes. "Hello?"

"I think – yes, I'll get you to your car, of course, but you really should come back to my office for some bloodwork. And to have your stomach pumped."

Her eyes went huge. "And waste those lovely beets?"

Lovely? "If you think those beets were lovely, then there's no way you might detect any poison she-"

"Oh, that." Ann waved a hand. "Your mother didn't poison my food. She poisoned my plate."

"She did WHAT?" Of course, of course, the way Ann had carefully positioned every bite of food-

"She must have had a nice strong poison ready, but didn't want me keeling over in front of you. So she just wiped a ring of it around the edge of the plate. So long as I avoided that, I was safe." She pouted a little, barely visible through the mask. "She really shouldn't use oil as a medium – unless she usually poisons the salad? Because it leaves a distinctive sheen, you know."

"And how do you know what a poisoned plate looks like?"

"Let's just say that the same parents who poured boiling water into my mouth to punish me, also taught me how to recognize a poisoned plate. Doctor," she looked up at him, eyes mild, "it's over. Hopefully I'll never have to do anything like that again. So let me get back to my car. Or lead me back to my car. Please."

"Follow me," he invited, and actually got twenty steps before he turned and grinned helplessly at her.

"You got past Mitzi."

"Yes," she said, smiling.

"You – please, you have to tell me how you did it!"

"No," she said, smiling harder.

"Come on!" He was almost dancing from foot to foot with excitement.

"I'm not gonna tell," she sang. "You can't make me."

"Please?"

"No," she said, and whooped as she tripped over the edge of a tiny drop-off; Doc caught her by one arm and swung her upright.

"You really can't see anything out here, can you?" he asked.

"Blind as can be. And I'd rather not reveal my location by using the flashlight."

"You know," she started walked and he fell into step beside her, bending his head a little to speak softly close to her ear, "there are ninja tricks for improving your night vision."

"You don't say," she said, a little too flatly.

"I could teach you."

That made her stop and look at him. With quick strokes of her fingers she pulled off her headscarf and stared up at him, face pale in the starlight.

"I am not a ninja, doctor. I never will be. See? No mask. And I doubt your parents would approve of you sharing your training with a person like me."

They both had to shut up and concentrate as the mountainside grew steeper under their feet. Several times Ann slipped or slid, and Doc was always there to catch her, to guide her – and of course to ask, again and again, how did she get past Mitzi?!

Ann's non-answers were getting more and more clipped by the time they actually got back to the road, where Doc immediately leaned against the door of Ann's car and refused to move until she told him what he wanted to know.

"Doctor," Ann crossed her arms and rolled her eyes to the sky, "I know that you're faster than me, so I can't dodge around you. And you're stronger than me, so I can't force my way past you. I don't suppose a bribe would work – no? Can't you just let me go home?"

"I'm thinking…Nope. If you could get past Mitzi, you can get past me." He tried to keep the grin out of his voice, and failed.

"Arrggh!" She ran the fingers of both hands through her hair. "How have you lived this long without someone strangling you?"

"Ninja," he replied along with her in perfect unison.

He went on, "If you just tell me, I'll let you go."

"You're being a dork, Doctor."

He winced, but stood his ground. She came closer to him, staring up with a bitter expression on her face. Not casually, she put one hand on the hood of her car. Her eyes looked grey in the moonlight, the cold grey of stone.

"Tell you what, Doctor. If you can promise me that I will never be invited to dinner again-"

"That should be-"

"Not finished yet."

"…Okay."

"If you can promise me that I will never see you again, and that you will never see me; that you will never stumble onto my property or under my car or into my shopping cart, and I will never break my arm or my neck and be brought to your office first; if you can absolutely swear that you and I will drive away from here and never, ever set eyes on each other again, then I will cry."

Her eyes actually seemed to well up with tears for an instant, and then she sniggered at his expression and the moment passed.

"And then I'll tell you how I got past Mitzi," she continued. "And you'll tell Mitzi how I did it. And then who knows? Maybe she is so impressed by my awesomeness that she leaves me alone. Or maybe not. Maybe she kills me. Maybe…I kill her."

All of those scenarios tumbled through Doc's mind, spinning and gleaming like flying shuriken.

"So, in the interests of saving my own neck, I can't tell you. Ever. Sorry." She patted him apologetically on the shoulder. "But it's not all bad news, because I'll give you some hints."

"Hints?"

"Sure! Let's see, I did not permanently damage the structure of the cave – I didn't make my own entrance, in other words. I didn't damage Mitzi – no drugs, no hypnosis. And, hmmm, here's a bonus fact: no tachyon bursts were released."

"Tachyon whats?"

"I didn't travel in time to get around her," she answered, rolling her eyes as though to say that's-so-obvious.

"Oh."

"But on the positive side, the method I use is not for sale. To anyone, at any price. And it can't be taken from me, and I can't do it for someone else against my will. So, really, unless you invite me to dinner again, we should be right as rain." She made a brushing-off gesture with her hands. "I gave you breakfast, you gave me dinner, we're done."

There was a rustling noise from beside them, and they both looked and saw two narrow furry faces looking at them from under the guard rail. "Rabbits," Doc said, dismissing them with a wave and turning his attention back to Ann.

"Hmm. Do rabbits – do that, usually?"

Doc looked again, and felt himself flush with anger. One of the rabbits had just rolled onto its back, and the second rabbit had assumed a hunched posture over it. They ground against each other in a fairly obvious fashion, and both of the rabbits were definitely grinning.

"Sean, that is NOT FUNNY!" Doc shouted, and Ann bent over, giggling hysterically.

"Oh, that is perfect," she finally gasped, straightening and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. "If he only had some birds that could do that on cue, I just came up with the best idea to liven up a boring business meeting." She stepped closer to Doc, close enough that he could feel the press of her body against him, and murmured in his ear, "And if you don't let me into my car right now, I'm going to start humping your leg."

He froze for a long moment.

"Those robots probably have recording capabilities; that is, if your brother isn't watching all this live…along with your parents."

"Fine. Fine," he said, slipping away from her and around to the driver's side of his own car. He opened the door and stared across the roof at her.

"I will find out," he said, slipping inside, slamming the door, fastening his seat belt. As he grimly watched Ann get into her car, his cell phone rang.

It was Gordito, and he sounded tired. "Doc, you must be outside or you wouldn't answer. When are you getting back?"

"I'm just leaving now," he said, fishing the keys out of his pocket.

"Judy's still awake, the stomach pump is all set-"

"We won't need it."

Gordito audibly swallowed. "She didn't make it through the cave?"

"She – made it. And made it back out. She's fine."

"She BEAT MITZI!?"

"She – I don't know what she did. She got past Mitzi. Somehow. And didn't get poisoned." Doc started the car, and Gordito said something he didn't catch over the motor.

"What?"

"I said is she coming back with you?"

"No, of course not. She's fine. She doesn't need to come back with me."

"Oh." Did Gordito sound disappointed? "Well, I'll see you soon, then."

"Right." He pulled out of the parking space and paused for a long moment, meeting Ann's crisp gaze through his side window. Then he turned his attention back to the road, and drove away.

* * *

"Damn, but that is a complicated man," Ann said to herself, watching the Doctor's car drive out of the turnaround in front of her. She wished she could reach into his mind and figure out what the hell he was thinking right now-

A sleepy yip interrupted her train of thought.

"Ghost," she whispered, mindful of ninja ears, "I told you to go home!"

The little white dog blinked up at her from the passenger side floor space.

"And keep down," she added. "He'll think that I left you in the car all this time."

Another yip, and Ghost put his nose back on his paws and appeared to sleep.

She watched the Honda's taillights fade away around the corner of the mountain, and for a single instant she let her mind fill with what might be. Then she took those thoughts, locked them into a very small part of her mind, and put the key out of her reach.

"It's a good thing it's his brother that I'm really after," she muttered, starting the engine and flicking on the headlights. She made a rude gesture to the rabbits that were still posturing under the guard rail, and drove away.


	11. Walking on Sunshine

Doc had bad dreams that night: in the only one he could clearly remember, Ann Wales showed up to dinner with a side dish under a silver dome – but when he lifted the lid and looked, the plate was piled high with teeth, gleaming ivory teeth that rained out in an endless cascade. He woke up early the next morning; he'd given Gordito some questions before he went to bed the night before, and he hoped that the boy had already come up with some answers.

Apparently so; he was sitting at Judy's computer, typing busily away.

"What did you find?" Doc asked, and then looked closer. There were dark circles under Gordito's eyes, and his clothing was rumpled. "Have you been here all night?"

"No," he yawned hugely, "no, I tried to sleep but I kept thinking. Here's what I found.

Doc leaned over Gordito's shoulder, and watched as a series of pictures flashed across the screen: newspaper articles, legal-looking documents, and photos.

"Ann Wales, AKA Ann Chwydiad, is a naturalized US citizen. There was a fire in the town in Wales where she supposedly grew up, and they lost-"

"All birth certificate records and medical records." It was the classic cover for a false identity.

"Yep. And there's no record of her graduating from any European college, with or without a computer degree. She came to America eleven months ago. Five months ago, a company bought the property that her house is on." An overhead map of Cumberland, and Gordito's finger traced a path around a substantial area of the border.

"It was a newly formed company that bought the area, Caddis Construction. They filed plans for building an ultra-expensive gated community – but there was never any advertising, and no attempts to sell the houses. In fact, they only built one house. Hers."

A satellite view; Cumberland again, but the section of wooded lands that now apparently belonged to Ann were black.

"What?"

"Every current aerial map is missing that area – even Google."

"Even Google?" Doc's eyes grew very big. "That's – unbelievable."

"There's more. The gated community was going to have its own heliport and airfield, and it might have been built."

"Might have been?"

"Caddis Constructions officially stopped construction a while ago because of the economy: but they kept buying concrete and rebar. I think they were still building."

Doc drummed his fingers on the counter, and then quickly leafed through the day's appointment book. "If I sent him home fast…wrote her the prescription and had it waiting…yes, I think I can spare an hour and go see this airfield."

"Are you going to meet your brother there?"

"Who – what – huh?"

"Yeah, maybe you should listen to your answering machine?" Gordito pointed at it, and the blinking red light.

Doc hit the button and listened, skimming the first two messages from patients and then stopping to hear his brother tell him, with no little glee in his voice, that he was going to be meeting Ann Wales at her airfield this morning, and he'd bet Doc that he would find out the secret of getting past Mitzi before him-

A flutter of wind and the click of lacquer against steel; Doc was armed and out the door before Gordito could say "Wait!"

Judy knuckle-walked into the office, looked at the computer and scowled.

"It wasn't my fault!" Gordito protested. "I didn't have time to stop him!"

Doc suddenly reappeared. "Here, Judy – hand out these prescriptions for me, would you?"

Judy looked like she was ready to grab Doc and snap him off at the knees to keep him still, and Doc noticed.

"Gotta go. Bye!" And he vanished again.

Gordito could sense Judy's mood, so he quickly saved his files and slipped out of her seat. Judy sat, and put her chin in her palm, and stared across the empty waiting room with the bitter gaze of a statue.

* * *

I'm not in love, Dark Smoke Puncher told himself as he jumped the third fence and started moving across the grey expanse of fresh-poured concrete. Even if I stayed awake all night thinking of the way her hair moved when she danced, that wasn't love. It was infatuation, it was hormones, and he'd get over it. Expose himself to it like it was some poison, and every dose would have less effect.

Besides, she wasn't really flirting with him. It was just a game. Maybe he could pretend it was training.

Up ahead there was a new building of fresh corrugated steel. When he went to the door, Ann Wales opened it for him, and smiled. She was wearing blue jeans and a plain blue long-sleeved shirt with grease on the cuffs, and there was more grease under her nails and on the tools shoved carelessly into her pockets.

His heart did a little flip-flop, or maybe that was his stomach.

Poison, he told himself. Small doses, and besides she was dating – no, wait, she wasn't dating his brother, was she? But she was old, ridiculously old. And she was the youngest of five sisters. Maybe – maybe she had a cousin.

"Well, come in!" she invited him, and he stepped inside the hangar. It was a little warmer in here. There was lots of empty space, and a vintage boombox (currently blasting out some classic rock, Duran Duran he thought) and a plane. The plane.

He sucked in his breath. It was a little Piper Cub, with a blatant camouflage paint job: pale blue and white, with no safety lights on the usual points. Instead there was what looked like a rocket pod at each wingtip, and tubes sticking out of the body at strange angles. And oddly enough the wheels were chained to the floor, through heavy metal bolts set into the concrete.

"How did you get that here?" A plane like that taking off from any public airfield would set off everyone's alarm. You just didn't paint planes like that, unless you were a smuggler or some other sort of criminal.

"Had it shipped; a helicopter left the box outside, and I pried it open and taxied it in." She leaned a little closer to him and said softly, "Looks just like the one in the game, doesn't it?"

"Yup."

"So – want to look inside?"

He did, and it was – just like the game. The same controls, and the same extra controls, fastened with bundles of wires to the mysterious equipment bolted between the seats and in front of the passenger side. The same hand-cut irregular machine cases, the same wiring, the same weird non-English letters written on every flat surface.

"It's pretty close to the game plane," she said with a friendly smile, sliding into the passenger side. "I had to modify the digital model so that one person could handle all the controls."

"So if I turn this on-" His hand reached out, longing to touch the red switch under its cover. But then he stopped. She wouldn't let him – it wouldn't really –

"Go on," she said, and nudged him with her elbow.

He slowly lifted the cover on the switch, paused for a long moment, and flicked it to the ON position.

He felt light-headed. He felt dizzy. He put his hand on the seat beside him and pushed, very gently, and moved up, floating, until his head touched the roof of the cabin. He was flying.

Antigravity.

"Is it real?" he said to Ann, a little desperately. She looked up at him, and her hair suddenly was floating around her head, like she was underwater. She reached out, sliding her hand to the clasp of his necklace which she unfastened with one hand. She held it between them, and spun it round and round like a piece of string. And then she let go. She let go, and it kept spinning there between them, circling like a propeller blade.

"Antigravity," he said again, reaching out and touching the necklace, to watch it wrap itself around his finger like a living thing. Then his eyes went back to Ann's, a little desperately.

He'd told his parents he was going to try and find out how she got past Mitzi. Well, not told them so much as wrote a note. And hid it, where they would find it. Eventually. He had left that message on his brother's answering machine, though, so he was covered there. But right now, getting secrets out of her was the last thing on his mind.

"I want to fly it," he said, the words pouring out. "I want to – so bad."

Ann looked relieved, as she eased the switch back and they both drifted back into their seats.

"I think that can be arranged."

* * *

It was actually faster to cut through the woods than to take the car, and Doc thought to himself as he ran, hurtling fallen trees and boulders with ninja ease.

The most logical idea was that this was an attempt to kidnap one or all of the McNinja family. But if so, why hadn't Ann just taken them on last night? Perhaps her mysterious method only worked on one ninja at a time – no, that was no good. She could have snatched Mitzi from inside the cave mouth, taken her hostage. Dan would do almost anything to get her back.

Come to think of it, it must have cost millions of dollars to buy that land and set up even the skeleton of a gated community – so why was she working at the hospital if that was her money? He had the distinct impression that people with that sort of money worked at managing that money, and nothing else. Certainly not sitting in a cramped computer room, juggling numbers all day. Unless she had some plan, infiltrating the computers at the hospital to do – something bad. Something real bad.

He was clear on one thing: this was an attack. It was his task to find out what she was up to – and what she was up to with Sean.

He had vaulted several fences without a pause, but there were more and higher fences around the end of 'Caddis Way.' This must be where the airfield started. These would take a little more work.

* * *

The boombox had cycled through Madonna and Blondie and Joan Jett while Ann showed Dark Smoke Puncher all the innards of the plane: the modified engine that ran with the minimum of oxygen, the jets that would let it maneuver in empty space, the racks of batteries to keep the antigravity engine powered, the add-on equipment to keep the passengers from either freezing to death or suffocating. He'd followed along, excited as he never had been before, because she listened to all his questions, never put him down, seemed delighted at his suggestions. And she always called him by his ninja name; if Doc had called him Sean in front of her, she seemed to have wiped it out of her mind.

He wasn't in love, he knew that now. He was in awe. She had written that awesome game, and she had invented antigravity, and she had rebuilt this plane by hand, and she was – she was awesome, flat out awesome. And she seemed to think that he was at least a little awesome too.

"Um, can I ask you a question?" He sidled a little in the airplane seat. They were back inside, and he was holding a handful of switches in place while she tinkered with the antigravity engine.

"Sure," Ann said, frowning as she delicately adjusted one of the dials with a tiny screwdriver.

"The, um, college where you learned about computers. In Wales. Do they accept foreign students?" That last came out a little too fast.

Her fingers froze, but she didn't turn her head to look at him. "Wales is a little further away than you might think, culturally. And the school in question conducts all its classes in Welsh. Are you willing to learn another language just to go to college?"

"Are you kidding? I would love to study – where you did." Whoops, he'd almost said 'study under you' and that was a bad thought, baaaad thought.

She tucked the screwdriver away in her shirt pocket, and leaned back and looked at him, her eyes a little sad.

"I have to confess: Gordito spilled the secret about the robot animals. And I read up on the subject before I came to dinner."

"Yeah, but – you knew what to study. You knew about security robots before you got there, you can't fool me."

"That was work experience. Outside of college. As you might have guessed," she frowned, "my parents didn't approve of college, or of work experience."

"Uh-huh, that sounds familiar...the company you worked for, are they hiring?"

"Dark Smoke Puncher, are you really that eager to leave home?"

"You've met my parents, and they-" He paused.

She let her eyelids droop, looking at him with a calculating expression. "Your parents are not as proud of your brother as they might be. And they don't want you to follow in his footsteps, by getting a higher education."

He nodded. "That's it, yeah. Doc went to college, and when he came back, well, he'd changed. They can train me to be a ninja, and they want me to be a ninja, so – what do I need to learn anything else for?"

"Hurts, doesn't it?"

"No," he paused and thought, "…maybe."

"Look," she put her hand on his shoulder, then leaned closer, staring directly into his eyes. "I understand. Believe me. Maybe we can EEP!"

She vanished out the suddenly opened door of the plane, and he got a single horrified glance of her twisting in the air and then falling to the concrete, hard.

She screamed, shrilly. "Stop hurting me, Doctor! Stop hurting me, Doctor! Stop h-"

His brother was there; he must have grabbed Ann and thrown her out of the plane. He stood over her and yelled back, "I'm not hurting you!"

"Yo, dude!" Dark Smoke Puncher shoved the switches back into place, slid out and quickly moved to give Ann a hand up. She ignored his outstretched hand, staring up with terrified eyes at the Doctor.

So he rounded on his brother. "What are you doing – what the hell did you DO to her?"

"I didn't do anything, I don't know why she's screaming that-"

"Because it worked last time." Then Ann rolled over, fast, and scuttled across the pavement on hands and knees to intercept a little white dog running towards them, teeth bared.

"Ghost, no! Stay!" She grabbed up the dog and backed away from them both; the dog growled and wriggled in her arms.

"I'm not going to hurt your dog," Doc said, in a voice like cold steel. "But I am going to find out what you are really doing here."

"I'm showing your brother my plane."

"Your plane." He turned on his heel and stared at the plane, posture stiff. The dog barked shrilly at his back, and Ann petted it, making little soothing noises. Dark Smoke Puncher didn't know what to do; should he go talk to Ann, or would that make his brother blow up?

"You moved to Cumberland last week," Doc finally said without turning. "And I think you came here looking for something."

"Yes, I did. A pilot. I designed a video game that tested a unique subset of piloting skills, released it on the Internet, monitored who did well, and then moved to where the best player was."

"Whoa, so you moved here just to meet me?" Dark Smoke Puncher asked.

She looked at him and smiled. "Yep," she said smugly. "I need a pilot. A pilot who can fly that experimental plane to a very specific destination. I'm not good enough of a pilot to do it, unfortunately."

Doc turned and fairly flew across the floor, standing over her in an instant, staring down like a storm cloud. "What destination?"

"Ready to sign a NDA?"

"A what?"

"A non-disclosure agreement."

"No."

"Fine. Then I won't tell you. It's none of your business. This is my property, and your brother was invited here. You were not. I would appreciate it if you would leave now. I have business. And don't you have patients waiting for you, most likely?"

He could actually see his brother flinch under that suggestion, his shoulders hunching, conflict suddenly flickering through his eyes.

"Sean is-" and he stopped.

"Too young? He's taken his ninja name, and if the movies are accurate that means he's taking part in assassinations. If he's old enough to name himself, and to kill, then he's old enough to choose who he works for. Eh?"

"Yeah," he agreed.

"He can't fly some sort of experimental plane to some unknown destination, it's crazy!" Doc said, throwing his hands into the air.

"Well," Ann rolled his eyes, "he doesn't have to fly it right this minute, you know. He can practice. I'm not expecting him to be perfect first shot."

"Oh no?" Doc was sounding very cynical all of a sudden, and Dark Smoke Puncher eyed him warily. What did he have up his sleeve? But Doc's next words drove that thought out of his head along with all other thoughts.

"I'll fly it," Doc said.

"You will not," Ann said indignantly. "You haven't trained, and I am not impressed with your self-control. I'm going to be a passenger, and I don't want to end up a thin smear on the landscape because you decide to get punchy with me."

"I'll play the game and teach myself," Doc said, through what sounded like clenched teeth. "It shouldn't take more than a few hou-"

"No," Dark Smoke Puncher interrupted. "No way, man, it's, it's really hard! There's the whole interaction between the jets and the antigravity-"

"There's ANTIGRAVITY on that plane? I mean, you can – it can -"

"So much for my NDA," Ann said glumly.

"I can do it," Doc insisted hotly. "Sean can show me how."

"Why should I, huh?" Dark Smoke Puncher retorted.

"Because I won't let you do it, not unless I know that I can't." Doc held up one finger, then pointed it at his brother and said ominously, "I'll tell Mom and Dad."

"Surely they'll be glad he is getting hired for his talents already," Ann said sweetly.

"Dude," Dark Smoke Puncher leaned closer to Doc, dropped his voice, "I thought you weren't interested in her?"

"She's twice your age Sean, more than that, you've got to be nuts!"

Ann coughed. "Contrary to that act I put on at dinner, I am capable of being alone with a man without molesting him." She arched one eyebrow at them both. "I presume that's why you hauled me out of the plane so fast, eh? Thought I was going in for a lip-lock?"

Doc frowned down at her, and she frowned up at him. Then her eyes turned sly, and she smiled a surprisingly bitter little grin.

"Dark Smoke Puncher, would you be willing to instruct your brother on the game?" she asked, with just a hint of sarcasm in her voice. "Show him how it's done, so that he can prove to his own satisfaction that he is, or is not, capable of playing it?"

He paused and thought. That would be new: something he could do better than his brother, that his brother actually cared about… a chance to be the trainer, instead of the trainee.

"I'd consider it," he said, and watched the expression in his brother's eyes with delight. He hid that, of course. But it was funnier than seeing him dance.

"Obviously whichever of you is best would be hired for the actual flight mission," Ann said a little too slowly, letting the words roll on her tongue. "And as for payment – how thick is your hat brim?"

"What?" he asked, and Ann just reached out and pinched it between two fingers. Then she reached into her jacket and pulled out a stack of money. A BIG stack. She gravely measured out a wad of hundred-dollar bills about the thickness of his hat brim, and handed it to him.

This had to be a joke. It couldn't be. He started leafing through the bills, and every one was a hundred. And that was a lot of hundreds.

"They're non-sequential, if that's what you're wondering," she said.

"Um, how much is this exactly?"

She shrugged. "Let's say – ten percent down, ninety percent on delivery of either yourself or another well-trained pilot?"

Dark Smoke Puncher looked at the money in his hand. If this was ten percent – wow.

"Now remember," she slung an arm around his shoulder, and smiled at Doc in a way that had absolutely no warmth in it, "be nice. He's your student. You have to teach him, not frighten him or hurt his feelings."

Doc was visibly seething. "I think I can manage to learn, I do have a fair amount of educational experience, thank you very much."

"Of course. But you do lose some of your reflexes as you age, and learning might be one of them."

He could see the pulse beating in his brother's neck through the mask, and the sweat beading just above his eyebrows.

"Call me when you think he's ready – or if you decide he's beyond any hope." She closed his fingers over the money, and pointed obligingly towards the door. He moved towards it, only his ninja training keeping him from tripping over his own feet – or sprinting in circles, laughing. What a job – training his brother and getting paid for it.

"Oh, and one last thing before you both leave," she said, as they reached the door to the hangar. Doc stopped but did not turn around.

Ann sighed. "As attractive as you are from the back, Doctor, I would rather talk to your front."

He turned so fast he almost blurred, his tie snapping around his chest like a whip, and just glared.

"Thank you. Now, I have certain standards that I set myself for my employees – or my prospective employees. And one of them is that I do not get them killed for no reason. I want you to be completely informed of the risks involved in this mission, and if you decide to back out and let your brother take the job, I will not hold that against you. But that isn't the only way that you could die here."

She reached out, very slowly, with one fingertip out. Gently, she put the fingertip under his chin, and tilted his head back. Dark Smoke Puncher looked upwards as well, and they both sucked in air through their teeth.

There was something above them, clinging to the hangar's roof and walls. Something big in the shadows, motionless and yet intensely aware of them. He had a confused impression of slotted metal-meshed eyes, of too many limbs tense with weight or hanging loose, and weapons: blades, gun barrels, laser projectors, sonic cones, and other things he couldn't even identify.

"The discontinued military mechanical mercenary program HyperParanoid was a failure," Ann said softly. "The autonomous machines were too dangerous to be handled. I picked up this one for a very fair price on the surplus market, and as soon as I came here this morning, I gave it an order. Do you know what that order was?"

She removed her finger from Doc's chin, but he still kept staring upwards, slack-jawed.

"The order was, 'Do not shoot anyone who is wearing a mask in this building, even if they appear to be attacking me.'"

Doc's gaze jerked downwards. Ann looked up at him, cool and collected as though several tons of military hardware were not hovering over her head, waiting to strike.

"Please do not lay hand on me again, Doctor, without my express permission." She gave the tiniest of nods. "That's all. I look forward to hearing from you both." She turned to Dark Smoke Puncher, and shook her finger playfully at him. "And you – play nice."

He did, really: as they walked across the tarmac, he only trailed behind and mentioned what an attractive back his brother had twice.


	12. Take My Breath Away

Ann made her plans, she adjusted her equipment, and was just barely prepared when her phone rang and Dark Smoke Puncher announced that he would meet her at the airfield. He sounded – dispirited. She hoped he hadn't gotten into a fight. She waited for him, her heart in her mouth and her hands shaking. She hoped, she hoped so much, that she had a pilot.

"Double Snake," were the first words out of Dark Smoke Puncher's mouth, accompanied by a thumb-jerk towards his brother, who was following behind him with a distinctly sinister look of glee in his eyes.

"Double Snake what?" she asked.

"He's Double Snake."

"Oh. Oh!" she said, remembering. "The guy who showed up on the board a while ago, and played through five levels back-to-back, and then left after that long post about it being too easy?"

Doc rocked back and forth on his feet, looking far too pleased with himself.

"I thought you were a computer simulation, actually," she told him coolly.

"Doesn't matter," Dark Smoke Puncher said glumly. "He's better. Nothing wrong with his reflexes, either." He shrugged, palms out. "He should fly it."

Doc looked ready to jump in the air and click his heels together; instead he said something about a pre-flight inspection and slithered over to look at the plane with hungry eyes.

Ann's eyes followed him, but her attention quickly turned back to Dark Smoke Puncher, who looked very down. "Hey," she said softly. "I should thank you. And pay you," she added, reaching into her jacket and then realizing she would have to go to the cash box.

"For what?" he said to his feet.

"For putting the mission first. For saying that the best pilot should take the job – if you'd said you were better, would I have believed Doc over you?"

"Probably."

"Maybe not." She stepped closer, and ducked her head to see his brooding eyes. "It's a mark of considerable maturity to put the mission above a chance to show off your own talents, Dark Smoke Puncher. Some people never reach it. One of those people is-"

"HEY! The antigravity won't turn on!" came from the direction of the plane.

"You have to reset the battery array first!" Ann shouted back.

"Oh!"

"So," she went on, "thank you, again. I'll pay you in full. Would you mind staying while we get ready?"

"You're going now?" He looked up, fear showing in his eyes. "It's really dangerous."

"I know. But it has to be done. Believe me."

* * *

Doc didn't hear the conversation; instead he was trying to untangle himself. He'd turned on the antigravity, whooped with delight while spinning in the air, and managed to get all the cables for the headset knotted around him. And he couldn't reach the switch to turn it off.

Ann opened the plane door, stuck in her head, and laughed. Her hair fluttered distractingly around her head. "I should just turn this off now and watch you strangle," she said, then relented. She grabbed him by the belt buckle, spun him right while tucking his knee under his chin, and when she finally turned off the antigravity and he settled into the seat, he was still breathing.

His brain was boiling over with excitement, and some of that boiling came spilling out in words. "It works. It works! How does it work? Where is it-"

"Can I get a word in?"

"- patented?"

"NDA."

"What?"

"NDA, or you're out. And your brother too," she said, scowling as she went and grabbed two clipboards from a table at the side of the hangar.

Doc skimmed the document, which was surprisingly simple to understand for a legal form. He was to agree not to discuss the contract and associated acts and technologies with anyone, with 'severe penalties' accruing if he did – penalties depending on who he discussed it with, apparently. And who they discussed it with. He opened his mouth to tell his brother to read the last paragraph carefully, but the idiot had already signed it and handed it back to Ann, all puppy-dog eyes.

Doc signed more slowly. Ann tucked the clipboards under her arm with a military snap, and looked up at them with a deadly serious expression.

"Doctor. You will be flying this plane into low earth orbit. The target is a satellite which is not responding to my attempts to contact it. You deliver me to within communication range of the satellite.

"Dark Smoke Puncher has vouched for your piloting skills; I'll add that if you decide you can't get me within range, you will have the opportunity to fly back down and try again later. However," she said slowly, "I have no idea of how to pay you, Doctor. They say you do ninja work only for the good of the community, and not for money. I can say," she paused for a moment and gnawed on her lower lip," I can say that my actions will benefit Earth as a whole, and therefore by extension benefit Cumberland."

"I need a little more information than that," Doc answered.

"Okay. So. You've probably heard of the mythical creatures known as vampires-"

Both Doc and Sean snickered.

"Excuse me?" she said blankly.

"Vampires are real, I know that, everyone knows that," said Sean.

"Well then, would you be surprised to know that Dracula is real?"

"We've met," Doc said, clipping the words off. Ann stared at him, astonished.

"Ah – would you define yourself as an ally of Dracula, or-?"

"No," Doc said, remembering the sensation of cold immortal flesh crunching under his knuckles. "Hardly."

"If my mission succeeds, Dracula will be neutralized."

Doc looked at her; she was looking remarkably non-dangerous. He called up Dracula's image in his mind's eye, cold and old as a glacier, and just as remorseless. There really was no comparison.

"You're going to kill Dracula? How?"

"I said neutralized, not killed, Doctor. There will be no physical contact with Dracula during this mission, not if I can help it. So. Are you ready, Doctor?"

"Yes."

"No." She looked him up and down, and then pulled something out of her pocket that looked like a tube of white lipstick. "Sunscreen; put it on. It gets very bright outside the atmosphere. And I don't suppose I could convince you to strip to the waist?"

"That's right, you couldn't," he said, carefully running the sunscreen around his eyes and rubbing it out to the edges of his mask.

"Just as well, I didn't bring more sunscreen. But I'd hate to see you strangled by your tie in zero-G. So, I brought self-adhesive Velcro dots – wonderful things really." She promptly started tacking Doc's tie and lab coat to his shirt; when she was done everything was still hanging in the same way, just a lot more secure. "And I'll bet you have various implements about your person currently held in place by gravity, yes? Here." She handed him a bundle of Velcro strips, and he carefully stuck his weapons (hidden and visible) and stethoscope into place.

She took the sunscreen back and rubbed it on her own face, carefully, getting it well into her hairline and around her ears. She picked up a third clipboard, running over it with a pen. "All right. The contractors are gone, the hospital knows I'm offline, airport schedules are loaded into the tracker. I've got fuel, oxygen, batteries, test projections, extra cables. I need to give you the death duty-"

Doc flinched. Ann pulled a thick envelope out and went to stand in front of his brother. Formally, she offered him the envelope with both hands; after a moment's hesitation, he took it.

"Dark Smoke Puncher. If we do not return, please give this paperwork to your parents, along with my sincerest apologies. It contains the appropriate legal forms so that they will be able to claim a death-duty for their son against my estate."

Doc's mouth hung open. He couldn't remember anyone ever doing that for him; it was archaic, the sort of thing you read about in romantic ninja tales from the past, not today. He bet she'd seen it in a movie.

"Um. Okay," Sean said.

"Don't you need to rewrite the forms? Since I'm going and not Sean?" Doc asked.

She shot a look at the envelope in Sean's hand. "No, actually; it just says 'beloved son of the McNinja clan.' Are you saying I should get a discount on the death duty?"

"No, no, let's just leave it," Doc decided. He wished he could see what the look on his parents' eyes would be when they read that paperwork, and then kicked himself mentally: if they read it, it would mean he was dead and in no position to enjoy their expressions.

Ann rubbed her hands together briskly. "Dark Smoke Puncher, would you like to watch from the control tower?"

He would; he watched as the small cloud-colored plane rolled out onto the far-too-short runway, oriented itself, and leaped into the sky, flicking out of sight before he knew it.

Dark Smoke Puncher leaned back in the control tower chair – it was an awesome chair – and wondered if he was supposed to wait here. He looked at the envelope, and then remembered he had schoolwork to do. Time to head home, he guessed. Should he give his parents the paperwork now, or wait for Doc and Ann to return – or not?

* * *

"Any idea of how I'm supposed to keep from flying into another plane? I noticed that nobody seems to be noticing us." Doc's voice was sarcastic; his hands were rock-steady on the controls as he put the plane into a long spiraling ascent. "Looks like you weren't kidding about the plane being radar-transparent."

Ann slapped a small grey box that was stuck to the bottom of the windshield, and bright colored dots suddenly flickered across the glass in front of him.

"Green dots are airborne craft that have no way of intercepting us," she said tersely, adjusting a dial on the antigravity equipment under her left elbow. "Yellow dots have the capability to intercept, but aren't currently going to. Red dots are intercepting."

Doc's eyes widened as they soared into a cloudbank and then above it into a world of eye-hurting white and darkening blue. The windshield was still covered with dots, mostly green and only a few yellow, and none red. That little box was an aid to air navigation that must be worth a fortune – if it really worked. And pulsing on the ceiling of the cockpit was a blue X.

"What's that X?"

"Our destination. As soon as the air starts getting too thin to give us lift you'll need to start switching over to the rockets-"

"I know, I know!"

She looked a little aside at him, and then hissed as a battery indicator started flickering between her feet; she spent a few seconds switching cables, then sat straight and said, "Sorry you aren't enjoying this."

"I wasn't hired to enjoy it."

"Right." And then they were silent, spiraling up into the blackening sky, following the blue light as it crept from the ceiling to the very top of the windshield. The seats at their backs started to heat up; she handed him a helmet with attached air cable and he put it on, letting the airtight seal tighten around his neck, testing the radio that would let him keep talking to Ann. It wasn't that much later that they were zipping the atmosphere bubbles over themselves; now each of them would be enclosed in their own air pocket. The bubble sealed around their necks, and long transparent gloves were attached to it, letting them handle the controls.

"The engine's stuttering," he reported tensely over the helmet radio. The sheets around them were taut as the air pressure dropped outside.

"I noticed. Just switch it off and go to the rockets, you'll need the fuel to get back down." She fiddled with some nozzles in front of her, and said dryly, "Be glad that this is a simple antigravity drive. An inertialess plane would be a hundred times harder to fly. But with that, you could take this plane to Mars and back in an afternoon."

He felt his skin creep, all over.

Mars. Somewhere on Mars was the cure for cancer – Dracula had told him that it was hidden there. So if Dracula was neutralized – whatever that meant – and he could get to Mars….he had the sudden impulse to blurt all this out but just for once he shut up. Better not to let her know that he would do anything, anything, to get to Mars.

"Oh really?" he asked casually.

"Yes, but we aren't going to Mars. Fortunately. And – watch it. Satellite, Doc – jig right NOW!" He did so, overcorrected, and watched as a bright metal mass zoomed past their wheels. And there was nothing under those wheels but many miles of empty space, and the marble-swirled surface of Earth.

"Can't you recalibrate this – this thing there – to show the satellites?" he asked, pointing to the laser box.

"It's already showing all the ones that are broadcasting their position, but if there's junk up here that's not live, it might miss it. Fortunately our destination should be in a fairly clear orbit.

They went up, higher and higher. It was getting colder; frost formed on the edges of the windshield. The air that blew from the helmet hose was almost hot enough to be uncomfortable, but he needed it.

"And there he is," Ann breathed, as the blue X centered itself on the windshield. Carefully, using only the rockets, Doc drifted the plane forward and saw an asteroid carved of glass.

That was his first impression; something lumpy and irregular, but translucent: he watched a star track behind it and its light barely flickered. It was shaped loosely like a spindle, with a narrower top and bottom, and it looked nothing like any spacecraft he'd even seen.

"I sort of assumed that we were going up to a satellite that had launched from Earth," he said, his voice a little tinny in his ears.

"Come on, come on!" Ann said, ignoring him. She was frantically typing at a tiny laptop that floated in front of her, hitting the keys over and over again. Then she punched a set of buttons that were duct-taped to the panel in front of her. And then she just glared, eyes wide.

"I am right here. Right here. Close enough to see you, close enough to pick up your broadcasts. Why aren't you acknowledging? What's wrong, what's happened!?"

"That thing is broadcasting?" It didn't look like it could; it didn't look like a machine at all really. I mean, he could see through it.

"Sure." She flicked on the radio and twisted the dial, and out of the roar of solar static came a rather plummy man's voice, speaking a long string of numbers intermixed with nonsense syllables.

Doc frowned, listening to the voice. It was sort of familiar – no, it was really familiar.

"Why is this satellite talking like C-3PO?"

She turned her frowning face to him, and then deliberately relaxed it. "So that if anyone picks up the broadcast, they'll think it's some sort of joke."

That was good. Very good. He would-

"Watch out for the wing!" she hissed, and he quickly tweaked the rocket controls, keeping them from touching the satellite – or whatever it was.

"Why?"

"If anything metallic touches the surface, it sets off the self-defense systems."

"Oh. Why?"

"Well duh," she said witheringly, "space pirates, of course."

"Space pirates. Space pirates?" You didn't," Ann unbuckled her seat belt and started searching around her side of the cabin, unrolling a long streamer of cable from its spool, "you never said anything about space pirates!"

"Well, they aren't likely to be here. And technically the satellite shouldn't freak out because there aren't any space pirates here. But the satellite should also answer my hail, answer it RIGHT NOW, and if it isn't going to, then I am going to have to go out there and make sure it can hear me."

The end of the cable was tipped was a large and elaborately forked gold connector, that looked like nothing Doc had ever seen. He was still working out how she was going to use it – maybe she could hang it out the window and use it as an antenna? – when Ann opened the door beside her to space.

He said "No!" and grabbed her hand as she reached for the zipper on her air bubble. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

"I'm going to jump over and plug in this cable, of course. There's an access hatch right there-" she pointed and he could in fact see a faint square of lines hovering on the murky-crystal surface, "and then I can definitely communicate."

"You – you don't have a space suit. You don't have anything! That is hard vacuum out there, you'll die!"

"I can seal off the mask," she twisted the hose between her hands, "and that will hold enough warm air over my face that my lungs won't burst and my eyes won't freeze. The cable's secure at this end, so I can pull myself back. Just keep steady here, Doctor. Don't touch with the plane; there's rubber bumpers on the wingtips but if you break something now, it's a long way down."

It was a long way down. He looked out the window and saw nothing below him, lots and lots of nothing-

"What if you miss? What if you fall?" Fall forever, he could never catch her.

"Then you've got a new plane, I guess."

"NOT funny, Ann."

"Doctor."

"What?"

She put her covered hand on his faceplate, plastic crinkling at her touch. "This is what I came here to do, Doctor. I have to get that satellite to talk to me. It's vitally important, to me and to everyone else on this planet. I can do this, Doctor."

"I don't want to watch you die," he said through gritted teeth.

"Going to close your eyes?"

"Never."

"Good man." She flicked at her controls, and the air was extracted from her atmosphere bubble. With a single swift motion she unzipped, twisted the hose shut, and leaped into space.

She soared, flicking across the emptiness, landing spread-eagled on the satellite. The cable trailed out behind her, and she seemed to be hunting to get the end of the plug into some sort of invisible socket – but it wasn't working. It wasn't working; she was drifting away from the surface, reaching back with her hands, desperately trying to do something, and then she twisted in midair (or mid-space actually) and dragged herself back to the plane. He could see her eyes wide with effort through the frost-faced airmask, and was quick to grab her and haul her back inside as soon as she was within reach. She slid into the plastic sheets and sealed them with shaking fingers, and the hot air roared up around her.

She spat out a filthy word. "The damn surface is too slippery, I can't get a grip to leverage the cable in! This is ridiculous! I am right here! We are right in sensor range! Why won't he open?"

"He?"

"The satellite – boats are she, satellites are he."

"Oh, naturally," Doc said, eyeing his controls. Then he looked back at Ann, who was curled in her seat, hands over her faceplate.

"I've got to think," she moaned to herself. "I am right here but he can't hear me. I don't dare try to de-orbit externally, I can't plug in the cable, and my fingers are killing me."

He asked to see her hand, and when she showed it he whistled to himself; she had lost her fingerprints, neat red wet circles tipping each of her fingers. The skin must have frozen off in the instant she touched the satellite.

"I need to get that cable connected!" she fretted.

"I could-"

"No, Doctor. Not what I hired you for." She went back to staring at the whatever-it-was floating beside them, shoulders tight with tension.

There was a water bottle Velcro'd to the side of the cabin. Doc reached for it absently, remembered that he couldn't drink through the helmet, and then just stopped and looked at it. It was filled with ice particles, but when he shook it he could see the water creep around the inside of the bottle like the Blob.

"Water," he said.

"What?"

"Water. Wet your sleeve and then jump; it'll freeze to the satellite and you'll-"

"Stick to it, yes, yes yes!" She grabbed the water bottle, stuffed it quickly through a momentarily-opened zipper, and then started getting it open and onto her sleeve. It wasn't easy; the surface tension of the water was high enough that she had to smear it on like frosting, and an awful lot of it ended up sprinkled over her like little glass pearls. But finally her sleeve was soaked – or as soaked as it could get.

"Watch it," he cautioned her. "You don't want to freeze solid to it-"

"Right. Right." She hyperventilated for a second, and then turned to the Doctor, her eyes bright with hope. Ceremoniously, she touched her hand to the front of her faceplate and mimed blowing him a kiss.

"My hero," she said meltingly, and then she pulled the zipper and was gone. Out the door, she flew across space, chased by a million tiny beads of water that froze white and spattered from her like sparks, and then she hit the satellite, sleeve first.

And she stuck.

"Yes. Yes!" He pounded his fist on his knee, watching as the cable in her hand socketed into the satellite. Then she turned and yanked at her sleeve: just as he feared; it had frozen solid. She didn't panic though; she just braced her feet and heaved and came soaring back to his waiting hands pulling her inside.

She dived into her air bubble, sealed it, and pounded on her laptop again. This time she seemed happier with the result. "Done. Done! Got him now-"

The stream of numbers coming out of the radio stopped, cut off; and in the silence they looked at each other.

"Is that" good, he was going to say, when the plane suddenly lurched around them.

Ann pushed a button on her helmet and shouted, "Be careful! We are fragile!" Then she pointed; a long elaborate mechanical arm had snaked out of one of the ends of the satellite, and had clamped to their right wheel. It pulled them sideways, turning the plane so that Ann's door was aligned with the pointy top of the satellite. That top suddenly slid backwards, folding in on itself, and Doc had a quick glimpse of lights, buttons, handles, long spiraled ridges studded with strange machinery.

Something appeared around them; it was a silvery bubble, thin enough to see the stars through. Ann pulled off her helmet before Doc could scream "No!" But – the air pressure gauge was rising, and the temperature too. Both kept rising until they stopped at sea-level air pressure, and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. In space!

Ann paid no attention to Doc's confusion, instead she jumped, shoving off from the doorframe and shooting into the satellite. He heard her shout, "Where the hell have you BEEN, Horanckk?"

"Horanckk?" Doc asked himself, and listened as a flood of undecipherable words came spilling back, all in the lightly British-accented voice that had sounded so much like C-3PO. And it still sounded like C-3PO. But Doc knew or had at least heard a lot of different languages, in college and elsewhere, and this sounded totally unfamiliar. And Ann was answering, in the same language.

Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to him, so Doc carefully unbuckled, clipped his sword to its harness, and drifted through the plane and into the satellite. His lab coat drifted around his waist like smoke, and he was glad he'd let Ann tack it down with the Velcro.

The first thing he saw was a ring of buttons right by the entrance. Definitely buttons, in two concentric rings. There was sort of a pressure-pad in the center of the ring, and he wondered if you were supposed to press your thumb to it and adjust the settings of the buttons somehow. The buttons were labeled, but not in English.

Not in any language he recognized. And there were more buttons, more controls, forked levers, spiral sockets, and none of them familiar.

He looked inside; the interior of the satellite was opaque, a single long tube with the walls covered with hatches, video screens, panels, doors, controls, and a thousand flickering lights. The bottom of the tube showed the swirling clouds of Earth in the distance; he hoped that was a screen and not a window – or open to space.

Ann was about midway down the tube, braced into some sort of skeletal metal clamp that might serve the purpose of a chair, typing with both hands at two separate keyboards while continuing to spit out more strange words. She had taken her shoes off, and stuck them to the wall by her head, and she appeared to be typing with one of her bare feet as well. The C-3PO voice kept answering her, but Doc couldn't see anywhere for someone else to be. This satellite was tiny inside; not much bigger than four closets stacked top-to-bottom.

"Hi," he said, and Ann twisted and looked at him.

"You don't need to come in here."

"Oh come on, I had to see this. I mean, this is incredible!" He was staring at a video screen beside him, which was showing something like a march of army ants – if the ants all wore elaborate headdresses, and carried weapons in their free legs. "This …it's alien. Alien technology."

"You are very perceptive, Doctor," she said.

"Did the government hire you to come up here?"

"No, Doctor. No Earth government did," she said, emphasizing Earth just a little bit too much.

"Right, right, sure! Sure, they'd do something a bit more – a bit more solid, you know? Not quite as haphazard. So then – if it wasn't an Earth government – it was a non-Earth government. It was," he swallowed in delight, "an alien government. You're working for aliens!"

She turned to him, leaning back in the chair-bracket that fitted her so perfectly. She looked at him and gave a nervous smile. Her hand rose as though in her normal reflex to cover her mouth; then she deliberately dropped it and smiled wide.

Her smile showed perfectly normal-looking little white teeth. Normal, except that they seemed a little crowded to the front of her jaw. He could see eight - ten – fourteen teeth in both upper and lower jaws, and she wasn't smiling all THAT wide. It really was too many teeth. And they were all alike, little chisel-shaped teeth. Far more teeth than any human being would have….

The Doctor felt light-headed for an instant – and it wasn't just the lack of gravity. "Oh my goodness," he finally whispered.

Ann Wales, Ann with the too-pale eyes and too many teeth - she wasn't working for aliens.

Ann Wales was an alien.


	13. Higher and Higher

"I see you finally figured it out…. Sorry I didn't tell you sooner, Doctor," she said, looking at him with an indecipherable expression – something like sadness.

"Buh-but, that's impossible. You can't be an alien. Life doesn't evolve that way, what are the odds that an alien would be able to breathe Earth air and eat Earth food!"

"Evolution is – not quite as isolated a system as you think. And I had an artificial appendix installed; it injects bacteria into my gut that lets me live off your food."

He squinted suspiciously at her. "Do you really have a gluten allergy?"

"No, that's just," she pointed at herself, "my taboo."

He looked her up and down: ten toes, ten fingers, arms and legs and torso normally proportioned. Nothing about her would make him say 'alien' if she hadn't let him see her teeth. "You look very human."

"Fully dressed, yes."

He definitely didn't want to follow down that path too far. "But you came right to my office and, oh man, you really did not want that MRI, did you."

"I nearly jumped out of my skin!" She put her head back and laughed, really laughed. "I was terrified you'd just grab me and drag me to the hospital. I could hardly explain that I immune to any Earth infection."

"Look," he drifted forward and then flailed until he found something to grab onto that didn't look like a control panel, "you can't be an alien. You – you speak English, you make English jokes, you use slang, you've seen Earth movies! You've seen Ghostbusters! What sort of alien comes to Earth and sees Ghostbusters?"

"An alien who doesn't want to be caught by surprise. I took months preparing before I entered orbit: analyzing data from Earth, studying your languages, watching your entertainment. Once I knew how old I was going to be in Earth years, I watched everything that I would have seen growing up. And I liked Ghostbusters," she said chattily.

Something in Doc's head howled with glee at that; he ignored the howl and said, "But you know Earth computer systems-"

She shrugged. "Math is math. And I had an in, as you say - not everyone who designed Earth computer language was human, you see. Having someone sneak in and make sure your computer specs are congruent with interplanetary codes is a standard way of helping budding civilizations integrate into galactic society more easily."

"Not human," he breathed. "That's brilliant."

"You still seem to be un-convincing yourself. Here, is that stethoscope just decorative, or does it actually work?"

"It works, why?"

She twisted herself free from the brace and flew towards him, stopping herself with one spread hand on the wall behind him. She reached to his neck and pulled the stethoscope loose, pressing the receiver to her chest.

Slowly, too slowly, he took the earpieces and put them to his head and listened to her heart.

THUMP-thump, THUMP-thump, thump-THUMP, thump-THUMP, THUMP-THUMP, thump-thump, thump-thump, THUMP-THUMP - and it repeated.

"You - you have a sixteen-cycle heartbeat?" he asked, eyes staring at nothingness.

"That I do," she said, her voice booming through the earpieces, then apologized as he took them off too quickly.

The C-3PO voice chattered again, and she held up one hand. "Horanckk, be introduced to your fellow employee, Doctor McNinja. And speak English while he is present."

An inquiring sound, not a word but sort of a hum.

"You taught me English, Horanckk, it will be no problem to speak it again."

"Ah," the voice coughed, "pleased to meet you, fellow employee."

"Where are you?" Doc asked.

"Horanckk is an artificial intelligence; he lives in the computer here."

"Not lives, exists," Horanckk said fussily. "And this is only a redundant copy of myself, brought here as part of the assignment."

"Assignment, yes. Speaking of which – Horanckk, where the – what happened? Why didn't you get my messages? I went down to do some data collecting, and the next thing I know the link goes dead. I'm left with the clothes on my back and petty cash, and no matter what I do I can't get you to respond! I had to kludge up an antigravity drive to get back up here-"

"Kludge," Doc said, flatly.

"You know, assemble out of native components, with no instructions and no reference materials except my memories. It was an unbelievable pain." She shrugged. "But I knew that it could be built, so I just – built it."

Doc tried to imagine building, say, a fighter jet from scratch while living in a Stone Age culture, and failed. Unless Earth science had just stumbled past the secret of antigravity, building an engine from scratch like that was a miracle.

Ann was glaring at the wall. "And now that I am here, you are going to show me, step by step, exactly how I got cut off from you, Horanckk!"

"I – I," the computer stuttered, "I forgot who you are."

Ann twisted her head at an odd angle. "Horanckk, you don't forget. You are a computer."

"But I did! I lost my central recognition string, there was a cascade purge and then I was in orbit but I couldn't remember who brought me here! I received your signals but I couldn't process your authorization. It was only when you retransmitted your identity using the physical line that the block broke."

"And none of your backups came online?" Ann drifted over to the opposite wall and flicked a row of switches, and watched the abstract patterns on two screens between them with hypnotic fervor. "That's not likely. In fact it's next to impossible. Sabotage?"

"It would be congruent with the earlier damage to the life support system, Madam."

"Hmmm." Then she shook her head, hard. "No, look, I'm keeping you here for no reason, aren't I?"

She smiled and drifted straight towards Doc, stopping herself by pressing her feet on each side of his knees. They were chest to chest, and he reminded himself that in free fall this might be the normal way to have a conversation with someone. An alien, right here, why hadn't he noticed: the way the fine blood vessels in her eyes formed spirals, the odd curves of her ears, the muscles around the hinges of her jaw were all wrong when he saw them this close, the-

"Horanckk, do we have Earth compatible atmosphere? And power adaptors?"

"Plenty of both."

"Fine. Connectors, please?" She opened a hatch by her elbow and hauled out a long gleaming cable, and a corrugated hose. Pressing them both into his hands, she said, "You can top off the air tanks with this one, and re-charge the batteries for the antigravity engine with these. I'm afraid the engine will shut down permanently once you land, but that's built in."

There was a long pause.

"You can go now, Doctor," she clarified. "Goodbye. And thank you."

"I," he clutched the hoses hard, reminding himself that this was really happening, "I can't leave now!"

"Of course you can," she frowned, drifting away. "I hired you to get me to the satellite. Here I am, and here I stay. Safe, and out of the gravity well."

"I did keep track of your service time," Horanckk chimed it.

"So did I. Four hundred and fifteen days down there," she shuddered. "The only good thing was being able to buy meat without a license."

"You have had a pay increase while you were away. You have gone from twenty-two credits per hour to twenty-three point five."

"That's nice."

"Shall I put you down for double combat pay, Madam?"

"No, time and a half for gravity work," she said.

Doc coughed, and asked diffidently, "How much is a credit worth?"

Horanckk answered him. "Currently the standard galactic credit is trading at four thousand five hundred and ten Earth dollars."

Doc thought he felt his heart skip a beat. That was – Ann got paid eighty thousand Earth dollars per hour? Wait, time and a half – twelve hundred thousand. Per hour. And she had been on Earth four hundred days plus, which made her a billionaire. Unless a galactic hour was two hundred Earth hours or something…even then she was extremely rich.

But then something jumped out at him. "Wait, why should the galactic credit be worth anything in Earth dollars? Why is there any exchange rate at all?"

"Your employee is very intelligent, Madam."

She shot a look at Doc, and then at the controls beside her. "Answer his question."

"Doctor McNinja, several Earth governments have tapped into the galactic communications web. They need to pay for that access with galactic credits, so there is a very select market for them. The occasional galactic visitor-"

"Or castaway," Ann added.

"Yes, Madam; the occasional visitor can trade their credits – discreetly."

"Discreetly," she clarified, "because if you aren't careful you will end up abducted by some government, and spend the rest of your life in a plain unmarked room, trying to explain how to get more 'people' to 'friend' them." She snorted. "Anyway, air? Power? You leaving?"

"I'm not leaving," he said, crossing his arms. This left him drifting with no way to move around, but it was too late to take it back now. "You haven't explained what this has to do with Dracula."

"I-"

"My payment," he interrupted, "is the neutralization of Dracula. I need to know how you intend to do it, and see you do it. That's my payment."

She crossed her arms in turn, and they stared at each other. Glared, actually.

"Is Doctor McNinja carrying a sword as part of a courtship ritual?" Horanckk broke in.

Ann wheezed in surprise. "No," she finally got out over the sound of Doc's giggling. "No, it is his use-weapon."

"Really? You know, there are many galactic courting rituals involving swords," Horanckk said, chattily. "Like leaving your sword at a woman's place of residence, and if she returns it within a day it means-"

"Horanckk, the Doctor is not interested in such things." Ann stared at the lighted controls, and the lights actually flickered in something like an expression.

Actually Doc was fascinated by it all, but the matter of Dracula was more important.

"Dracula?" he prompted.

"Yes. Dracula." Ann took the cables and stuffed them back into their panel, ran both hands down the sides of her neck, and stared at him. "Right. I work for a group of – freelance entrepreneurs of violence?"

"Mercenaries," Horanckk clarified.

"That's – blunt, but accurate. The achievements of Dracula are such that an automated monitoring of Earth's datasystems compiled his data, and calculated that he would be worth recruiting."

"You're going to hire - Dracula?"

"Why not?" She spread her arms wide, drifting upwards. "We can offer him new worlds to conquer, literally! An immortal General, leader of a hundred armies, brilliant and determined – who wouldn't want to hire him?"

Anyone in their right mind, he thought. "So – you're an alien mercenary?"

"Accountant."

"Huh?"

"I'm an alien mercenary accountant, actually. I do exciting stuff like spreadsheet analysis and database filtering. Though I did get combat training, free fall and gravity, so I can go in with the troops and examine captured datasystems. I was offered this mission because the fleet did an analysis and determined that I would be the best match for it."

"And so you're going to send Dracula a job offer? Written in blood, maybe?" His words came out a little too sharp, and she noticed.

"That is what I am here for, Doctor." She smiled. "Horanckk, has Dracula received and decrypted the communicator plans we sent him?"

"Yes, Madam. He has constructed a communicator, and it has been pinging once a day for the last forty-five days."

"Glad it wasn't two hundred. So, Doctor. If you watch me transmit the job offer, will that count as fulfilling our contract? And you leave?"

"I'll watch."

"Fine, fine." She went back to her chair-brace, settling herself and typing. Absent-mindedly, she reached out and stroked Ghost, who was sleeping in a tiny nook by her side. Doc followed the motion and went white.

"What – how did he get up here?" There was no way she could have smuggled the dog onto the plane, there wasn't room! And he would have seen the animal jump in here, wouldn't he?

"What?" She looked down. "Oh. Ah, that life support system malfunction I mentioned earlier? It didn't harm me, but it did kill him. Ghost is, in fact, a ghost dog. Well, dog-equivalent, not really an Earth dog but he can pass for one, just like I can pass for a human." She ruffled his ears with her fingers, and he blinked up at her with what looked like gratitude. "He was sort of reddish-blond when he was alive, but he came back monochrome. And since he's a ghost, he goes where he wants."

"There are ghost alien animals?"

"Not usually. But, well, maybe he belonged to a wizard before he ended up at the shelter. Wizards die without leaving arrangements for their pets, sometimes, same as anyone else."

"You can't just walk around with a ghost dog!" he protested. "Someone would notice. Wait, my father doused you with holy water!"

"And this has exactly what to do with my dog?"

"If you're controlling a ghost, that's Dark Arts."

"I'm not controlling Ghost. He's my friend, he does what I ask because he loves me. And any Earth test for the Dark Arts is hardly going to have any affect on me – or on him." Her hands stopped typing, and she sighed. "Horanckk, I'd better review the software puppet before we open the broadcast line. Ugh."

"Ugh?" Doc repeated.

She twisted out of her brace and floated downwards. "My communication with Dracula is going to be filtered. He won't see my real face or hear my voice; instead I'll be translated through the computer into something a bit more pleasant. Horanckk, give me a full-length playback here. The Doctor can give us a spot value judgment."

A silvery film appeared beside them, misting over the controls; then it solidified and showed Doctor McNinja his own reflection. But the woman beside him, floating in midair, was no one he had ever seen before in his life.

She was gorgeous; the sort of shocking beauty that would make people stop and stare in the streets. Her huge eyes were gleaming apple-green, her arms and legs (admirably displayed by a very tight white leotard with layers of seaming and glittering details) were long and tapering, and everything, her low-cut neckline, the lines of her chest, the perfection of her face, drew attention to the long, sloping, copper-skinned curves of her neck. She was smiling, a smile that made his skin creep.

Then she frowned, and said in Ann's voice, "Were my arms ever that thin?"

The woman mimed rolling up one sleeve that wasn't there, and Doc tore his eyes from her neck and looked at Ann beside her; she had rolled up her sleeve to show her own arm, stocky and muscular. She held it exactly the way the green-eyed woman did, and their arm moved as one as she flexed and frowned. The – the reflection wasn't real. Of course. It was a computer simulation, just like Ann had said.

Unable to resist, he reached out and touched Ann's bare arm, and felt it warm and solid under his palm; in the mirror, he was touching the impossibly slender arm of the other woman, and there was no space between his palm and her skin. The software must adjust to make the reflection match-

"All right. What do you think, Doctor?"

"She's – it's – beautiful." That was true. He quickly blurted out, "But too skinny for me." He looked at Ann out of the corner of his eye, wondering if she would pick up the hint and already regretting giving it.

"Really? That's the way one of my species would look, if she grew up in low-gravity and had plenty of surgery to polish her up. We calculated that she would be very attractive by Earth standards." Ann stared at her non-reflection for a long moment, blue eyes staring into green, and then said wryly, "I – my parents always wanted me look like that." She blinked and deliberately looked away. "Horanckk, any information from the Fleet about changes to the offered contract?"

"None."

"Can you cut the Doctor out of the transmission entirely?"

His reflection vanished. "Done."

"Doctor, if you could stay down there and watch?" She pointed towards the lower half of the satellite. He drifted downwards – a little. He didn't trust Dracula, he certainly did not. There didn't seem to be anything he could do over a video system, but-

"What if he does something like hypnotize you? And you say something you shouldn't?"

"Like what?"

"Like the fact that I am up here for starters. I'm pretty sure he remembers me. He's got a moon-based laser that can vaporize a human being through atmosphere; it can probably do a number on you."

"The signal is actually being bounced off several Earth sites before it hits Dracula, because I didn't want him to try and take the satellite – it's my only way back." She frowned hideously; the software image of her gave the tiniest hint of a frown that only made her look more attractive. "Horanckk, if the Doctor cuts me off, hold the puppet static and run a giggle-loop until I'm back in position. And obviously mute the Doctor's audio."

"Done and done."

"Has Dracula pinged the communicator today?"

"Seventy minutes ago, Madam."

"Well then." She stretched her neck, let herself drift into the center of the open space, and seemed to balance herself. She smiled, warmly; and on the software puppet, the smile grew nearly fluorescent with light.

"Open the line."


	14. Catch Me I'm Falling

There was a large blank spot in front of Ann; it misted silver and resolved into a picture of an empty room, with a heavy wooden chair facing the camera. The chair was empty."

"Hey, Dracula can't be photographed!" Doc suddenly remembered.

Ann lashed out with one foot and grabbed his thumb between two toes; with the other foot she wrote SPECIAL CAMERA on his palm. There was a sound of footsteps and Dracula swept into view, black cape undulating, white shirtfront and white face and eyes the steely blue of falling night that never ends.

"Greetings to Count Dracula, King of all vampires," Ann said, in a voice impossibly deferential and warm. A screen appeared beside the one showing Dracula, and the software puppet's image glowed there, brown and smiling.

"Greetings, alien," Dracula said heavily, seating himself. "Who are you, and why are you contacting me?"

Ann pressed her hands together in front of her. "I represent a collective of alien entrepreneurs, Count. Your fame has spread past this planet, as has your boredom with your home world. You have tried to communicate with alien races several times, to no effect – you thought. But you were heard."

Ann leaned forward; Doc got a spectacular view of the puppet's cleavage. "And now we answer your call, Dracula. We offer you contract to join us; I have all the information you need ready for transmission. Come with us; see new worlds, new peoples, learn and grow and feel young again, O Count!"

"A tempting offer," Dracula said, in a voice that did not sound tempted at all. "However, it occurs to me that my – condition – may preclude my finding sustenance on new worlds."

Ann simpered in the most adorable fashion, or rather the puppet did, following her lead. "Are you suggesting that I offer you a taste test?"

Dracula's eyebrows arched in an expression of mirth. "It hardly seems proper on such short acquaintance."

Out of sight, Doc mimed sticking a finger down his throat. Listening to Dracula pretend to flirt with an alien that he was probably thinking of draining like a bottle of soda was just gross.

"Count Dracula, our tests show that your biochemistry is compatible with that of several member-species of our organization. Or you could bring along human slaves, as you wish."

Doc grabbed Ann's foot and wrote ? on the sole; she ignored him.

"But there may be compensations for this. Our tests strongly suggest that it is only the light of Sol Three, your homeworld sun, that will affect your powers. It is possible that on an alien world, you could walk in the daylight, see the sunrise again…."

"Sunrise," Dracula whispered, his expression softening, and Doc could almost see him sway towards that thought. He imagined living hundreds of years in the cold and dark, and then to be offered the sun – who could blame the old vampire for being swayed? He felt pity, for an instant.

Dracula leaned forward a little, and his eyes were suddenly deeper, harder to look away from. "This communication method lacks a certain – intimacy, shall we say? I would be pleased to offer my hospitality, on one of my Earth estates or here on the Moon. This is a great change in my life, and I want to offer every courtesy to the one who has made it possible. It will certainly be no burden," he purred, the purr of a hungry cat, "to entertain such a lovely lady as yourself."

"We wanted to put our best face forward," she murmured huskily. Her (simulated) face and body were all glowing with promise, and Doc felt a quick pinch of jealousy: that this attention was being wasted on a walking corpse.

"Indeed. Well, and so do I!" Dracula laughed, fangs glinting in his cruel red mouth. "And so I think that you will tell me your exact coordinates. Now."

He stared, and Doc felt the pull of that gaze like fire, drawing him in, drawing him closer. Ann took the brunt of it, staring directly into the Count's eyes; her eyes were suddenly blank, her mouth slack. He could practically see the will drain out of her, her mind melting and forming itself to the vampire's wishes. "I am-"

Doc grabbed her by one ankle, whispered "Giggle loop!" to Horanckk, and pulled down; she moved with less resistance than a balloon. Just as he hoped, the software puppet didn't move; instead it giggled breathily, staring into the Count's eyes like one enchanted.

Doc pinched Ann's earlobe, hard, and then drew his hand back fast as she snapped at it. They stared at each other for a long moment, and he watched as sanity flooded back into her eyes.

"I told you so," he whispered.

She didn't answer; instead her fingers flew to the keyboard beside her, and typed busily. Another screen appeared overhead, hanging at an angle to the one showing the staring Dracula, but the second screen showed only a distorted wireframe of the Count. Doc pursed his lips; that could work. Watch the Count through the image degraded enough that hypnosis wouldn't work.

Ann drifted upwards, into the control zone (or whatever it was) for the puppet; it suddenly stopped giggling and said in a merry tone, "I do not feel that is necessary at this time."

Ann looked grimly satisfied; the puppet just looked pretty. Dracula frowned, and Doc's heart sank. Was he warming up his laser, even now?

"I have an English translation of our contract ready for transmission, Count. Would you like to see it?" the puppet cooed.

"I should be delighted."

A wave of an impossibly graceful brown hand, and a flickering of lights around the puppet. "Transmission complete," she sang.

"I will review this document and contact you," and the screen faded to black. The puppet vanished as well.

"Whew," Ann breathed, leaning backwards and then spinning end-for end. She ended up inverted with her face pointing towards Doc's.

"Thank you, again," she said. "We – I had no idea he was that strong." Delight was creeping over her face now, blotting out her expression of fear. "With that sort of power, he could be a soldier beyond compare. And if we can incubate his talents in others…!"

Doc had something a little more pressing on his mind.

"What was that you said about human slaves? Dracula can't-"

"Dracula goes into suspension," she pointed to the opposite wall and a long narrow slot opened, deep enough to hold a coffin. "I can release the slaves and then suspend myself, and leave for the Fleet. I mean really, would you want to travel with that man while he was awake? There isn't room in here for him and his ego and me – and I'd be the one who would go."

She flipped her hands in the air. "But that's neither here nor there. Are you ready to leave now, Doctor?"

"But if I go, doesn't that mean you can't get back down?"

"Oh no," she said lightly. "Now that Horanckk is back under my control, I can come and go as I please. He can just drop me down a forcefield tunnel – that's how I got down in the first place." She frowned at the wall beside her. "And then couldn't get back up."

"But wouldn't you be safer if you were back on Earth?" Doc was grasping at straws with his guesses, but he wanted Ann on Earth, where he could try and bargain for the secret of a space-drive that would get him to Mars. "Won't you be bored here?"

"Bored? Why? I have my computers, and Horanckk for company, and Ghost as well."

"But – but –"

"Look," she said, pressing her hand upside-down to his arm, "please go check the level of air left in the plane's tanks, OK? And charge up all the batteries. And go."

Without seeing what he would do she spun, pressed her feet to his chest, and shoved off; he squeaked with distress as he drifted down towards the opening to space, and finally managed to catch himself just inside the doorway. Hoe looked out with wide horrified eyes; it was a long, long way down. Ann didn't appear to notice this; instead she was saying something to Horanckk about encoding communications back to the fleet about her current status.

Horanckk said something about fold frequencies, and then said too abruptly, "So, this - Doctor McNinja. Are you - was there some particular reason why you recruited him?"

"He is very talented," Ann said, her voice a little vague.

"And?"

Doc hung perfectly still, trying not to breathe. Ann seemed to have forgotten all about him; hopefully this wasn't a side effect of Dracula's hypnosis. And if it was, hopefully it would wear off. Hopefully – she would keep talking.

"And what, Horanckk?"

"I was just wondering if you found him - aesthetic."

At first Doc thought the computer had said anesthetic.

"Aesthetic? Horanckk, you are an artificial, but you have visual scanners."

"And?"

She twisted in the air, hands raised and fingers spread, toes pointed; she hovered like an angel in flight and declared, "And seriously, Horanckk! A God must have sculpted that ass!"

Doc's vision swam pink. Aha, he thought to himself, free fall plus blushing…but most of his attention was focused on Ann's words as they came spilling out.

"His legs go on forever! His eyes could stop an army in its tracks! And he's smart, so smart, and so kind…and funny and sweet and…and…" she waved her arms futilely, "and me? I'm a creep."

She slumped in mid-air, all her exultation gone. "An alien creep who's lied to him, and insulted his family, and endangered his life. Why should he have any interest in someone like me? I doubt I'm his type. And I know I'm not his species."

"Madam-"

"And now the lecture, again? So soon?"

Horanckk made a fluttering noise - a machine's sigh? "I have heard this before, yes. You visit a new planet, a new environment, and immediately you latch on to someone. And you tell me that he-"

"Or she. Or other, Horanckk - I'm not prejudiced that way."

"Each time you tell me how wonderful and priceless and gorgeous that person is, and then you carefully make sure that they will never be your friend. You shut them out, you make them your enemy or your competition - or your employee."

"Horanckk-"

"And it worries me, Madam. It makes no sense, you falling in love over and over again and then never finishing what you've said you want to do!"

"Love?" Ann spun in midair, eyes vague. "Yes, I suppose I do love them - selfishly. Thinking of only how they could please me, and not-"

"I disagree, Madam. You do please them, in every way but the way you want them to please you. And then you go away."

"Oh, Horanckk." She actually stroked the control panel beside her, smiling at it as though at another's face. "You've remembered who I am for what, a few thousand Earth seconds? And already you've found that betting pool about when I'm getting laid next."

"Really, Madam!"

"Really. After all, you are the one who's running it." She bent her head and whispered something to herself, too low to be heard. Doc touched one foot to the spiraling ridge under him, trying to ease just a little bit closer to hear - and found himself helplessly drifting upwards, with nothing in reach to stop him. He slid like a cat on ice, arms and legs reaching for something, and didn't stop until he bumped into Ann's feet with his chest.

She stared down at him, startled. He stared back, a nervous smile crinkling his cheeks. Her expression went suddenly blank, even bleak.

"Sorry about that – I shoved you the wrong way." A pause. "Well, is there something I've said behind your back that you'd prefer I said to your face?"

"Well, actually, ah-"

(Say yes, his inner voice commanded him. Say YES! You want her to say it all, soon, now!)

"I thought you were getting ready to leave," she said.

"No, not unless you're coming with me. You're my patient, and if I leave you up here Dracula will incinerate you – either that, or he'll catch you alive."

They glared at each other in silence.

He went on, "Of course, you won't stay alive very long. His very own alien vampire, who knows what he's got planned for you."

Horanckk's voice sounded worried as he interrupted. "I have calculated the possibility that Dracula will have detected your vehicle leaving Earth's atmosphere, Madam, and it is non-trivially high."

She looked confused. "My calculations were that Dracula would accept the offer on the spot," she finally admitted. "The novelty factor – maybe the puppet should have looked less human."

"Well, couldn't you come back with me, and Horanckk will just contact you when the Count gives his answer? That way you'll at least be safe."

She cocked an eyebrow at him.

"Safer," he amended.

She looked up, or down, at the Earth hovering in space, and sighed.

"I shouldn't have gone down at all," she finally said, half to herself. "I always mess things up when I visit a new planet. I get too interested in the local food, or the native customs-"

"Or the natives," Horanckk chimed in, and she shushed him.

"You might think me rich, Doctor, but by galactic standards I'm actually solidly lower class, no matter what my family thinks." A wry smile. "I went down to Earth partially to look for unique items that I might be able to resell on the galactic market: art, foodstuffs, and so on. And then there's Ghost."

She whistled, and Ghost raised his head and fell down to them with her gesture. He balanced on Ann's shoulder and yipped at the Earth as though it were a bright beautiful ball for him to play with.

"And how about you? Want to spend a few more days chasing leaves and rolling in grass?" He yipped again, tail wagging, looking very much like a dog – good grief, he must have sixty teeth! Teeny tiny teeth like Ann's but still.

"Ghost? Up or down?"

The dog bounced off her shoulder, floated unconcernedly up the center of the satellite to the plane, barked once and then vanished inside.

"Well. Down, then."

"You're going because your dog wants to go?"

She suddenly glared at him, a glare full of frustration and rage, and then she deliberately quelled it. "Why not? He already died for me. It seems cruel to not give him what he wants. All right, now let me think."

She folded herself into a ball in mid-air, chin on knees, and stared at nothing with great concentration for a few seconds. Then she unfolded and twisted through the air, bouncing off one of the walls and shooting up the tube towards the plane. "Horanckk," she said, grabbing a cable out from behind a panel, "I'm going to patch you into the navigational snooper I put into this thing."

"Yes, Madam?"

"I need you to calculate a window where there will be a straight-line drop from orbit to the airfield that's marked as Base in the interior coordinates. I want a full two second window."

"Two seconds?" Doc asked.

"Two seconds," she confirmed, bouncing out of sight."

"How can we get from here to there in two seconds? Oh-"

Horanckk answered his question. "I have an anti-inertial projector, Doctor McNinja. I believe that Madam is proposing that you drop inertialess to the planet's surface."

"What happens when we hit?" Doc said, shivering all over.

"You don't hit, you land." Ann appeared beside him, typing away at another keyboard. "You just land, inertia perfectly cancelled. And if something goes wrong, Doctor, believe me, we'll never know. But if we can get down there fast enough, before the moon clears the curvature of the planet-"

"Two hours ten minutes Earth time, Madam."

"Thank you, Horanckk. If there's a window within that time, we drop. Dracula may have seen the plane come up, but it's in an atmosphere bubble now that should blur his instruments. He won't be able to see that the plane is NOT here – in fact, Horanckk, any chance of putting a projection of the plane inside the bubble, even after we leave?"

"It is possible. It would not fool a detailed inspection."

"Hopefully he won't come that close until he's signed the contract. Well," she stroked her chin, "I should decide what I need to bring down with me. Data backups, a new earpiece…." She drifted away, poking through the contents of various panels. Horanckk answered her questions as she looked for this and that, plugging things into panels and stuffing them into her shirt pockets, then sealing them shut.

"Fellow employee Doctor McNinja," Horanckk whispered. Doc looked and saw a single light blinking by his ear; he looked again and saw Ann at the far end of the satellite, working busily with tubes and a flickering light-wand at a panel. Horanckk was talking to her there as well, which sort of made sense: a good AI should be able to carry on two conversations at once.

"Yes?" Doc whispered back.

"It occurs to me that if this satellite is destroyed, Madam could be trapped on Earth for some time, away from all galactic standards of civilization."

"Your point?"

"Just that….just that….Madam and I have been together for a very long time, you see. Her family purchased me for her when she was a child, and she – took me with her. And she has always treated me fairly, never as just a tool or a machine. So – take this."

A little strip of the panel peeled itself off and floated into Doc's hand; the end of it was tipped with what looked very much like a standard USB connector. He quickly tucked the strip under a Velcro strap in his pocket. "And that is?"

"Madam's medical records, along with general information about her species."

Doc's hand clapped over that pocket.

"I have translated the text portions into English," Horanckk went on. "The video and audio files will have to speak for themselves, or Madam can translate. The data on that chip will be invaluable if you have further interactions with her. And, Doctor?"

Horanckk's voice suddenly went very soft and just a little sly. "If you could see your way fit to seducing her within the next eighty eight days, it would fall nicely within my leveraged bets. I could offer you – a ten percent cut?"

"Forget it," Doc hissed back, and just then Ann swooped past him.

"One hundred eleven days? Fifteen percent?"

"No."

If Ann had overheard their conversation, she gave no sign of it. "Here, this looks good." A view of the Earth showed on the screen beside her, laced with a thousand strands of glowing neon. Some circled the globe, but most of them looped from point to point on the surface. "Here." The point of view swooped, down through the clouds, a hundred strands of light interlacing and a single line drawn down through them, ending with a crisp overhead view of Ann's airfield. Very crisp – Doc could read the license plate of his car parked by the hanger.

"What's our window?" Ann asked.

"You will detach in four minutes, forty seconds. No optimum path exists for another eleven hours, twenty nine minutes. The projector is charging now. Maximum cloaking in effect-"

"Oh yes please. The last thing we need is Dracula figuring out that he can get an anti-inertial device by attacking you."

"Yeah, I think that would be pretty bad," Doc said.

"Not happening on my watch," Ann said; she was at the plane, apparently topping off one of the compressed air tanks. Then she threw the hose aside and said, "What am I thinking? We won't have time to run out of air, or to get cold! Doctor, anything else you want before we go?"

He jittered all over, trying to decide. "I – I can't think of anything," he finally confessed.

She wiggled her eyebrows. "Don't worry, Doctor. You're going to love this. Horanckk, commence rotation, and put the bulk of the satellite between the plane and the Moon."

"Adjusting orientation, Madam." Nothing changed inside, but the Earth swung out of view. Doc floated up the side of the satellite interior, and buckled himself into the plane's pilot seat.

But he wasn't going to be the pilot. He was just going to fall, fall straight down, nose-down in fact, and there was nothing he could do if something went wrong.

"Doctor McNinja, a pleasure to meet you," Horanckk burbled over the radio.

"Ah, yes. Goodbye, Horanckk."

Ann chimed in, "Goodbye, Horanckk, I'll call you from the surface."

"Yes, Madam. I will be doing a maintenance cycle."

"Do that. And do me a favor – put my name and authorization details on a few external storage devices and hook them up via redundant connectors, please? In case the fault returns?"

"Yes, Madam. Good luck."

Doc wondered if that luck was for her – or for him. His hands were locked on the controls, a useless deathgrip. The nose of the plane was ahead of him and the still propeller, and below that nothing but hundreds of miles of empty space.

"Doctor." Ann's fingers were on his shoulder; his muscles must be like rock under her touch. Ghost was sitting in her lap, staring out the windshield with great interest. "This will be over faster than you can be scared. Relax. It's going to be awesome. Horanckk, countdown, please."

"Yes, madam. Four, three, two, one-"

Earth hurled itself at him, opening like a great angry flower, clouds like a thousand hands whipping past too fast for the eye to follow, the ground a vague green blur that turned brown, was threaded by cities, by roads, by trees, by an airfield, and when the plane's nose was no more than ten feet from the ground it turned and landed on its wheels without even a bounce.

They were down.

"Whew," Doc breathed, letting out the air he had inhaled in – hell, he'd inhaled that breath in SPACE. And now he was back, in one breath.

"Whee!" Ann yelled out the window, then dropped outside the plane and ran a lap around it; Ghost ran yipping at her heels. "Well come on then," she said, tapping at his window, "taxi her in, pilot!" She stood in front and gestured where he should go, and he started the engine (fingers trembling like he was freezing, coincidentally enough) and did as she asked.

But while he moved the plane into the hangar, parked it where Ann pointed, and shut down the normal engine, he was thinking. Ann had climbed back into the plane, but he barely noticed. All of his attention was on the block of machinery that sat between the plane's front seats. The antigravity engine.

It should be no problem to sneak back here and take it away for closer inspection. She had said that her security wasn't up to full speed, right? And the HyperParanoid military drone was gone from the ceiling of the hangar.

He wished Ben was here. What he would have given to take this machine apart under his guidance, find out how it worked, give it to the world….

Ann turned to face him, deliberately.

Here it comes, he thought.

"Doctor, I owe you an apology. You had every reason to refuse this contract, and you have carried it out, above and beyond what I asked of you. So – I apologize."

The only person on Earth who knew that Ann Wales was an alien was himself, and he was alone with her. He had racked his sword behind his seat, but his hands and knees and elbows were all deadly weapons. They shifted, every so slightly, as she leaned closer to him. He saw nothing but depthless honesty in her eyes – which had to be a lie of course.

"Doctor, I really believe that you took this job solely so that you could try to remove Dracula. Even though this would impact on you in only the most indirect of ways, I do appreciate you putting the greater good ahead of your own. And I'm sorry that I have to do this."

There was a metallic CLUNK from between them, and she lunged backwards, both feet pressing hard to the floor of the plane, and the antigravity engine came loose with a snap and soared out through the open door on her side. Even before it hit the tarmac he could smell the thermite.

"No. NO!" He was out of the plane and around it and standing over the engine, frantically trying to decide how to put it out – no good. The thing was already smoking and warping visibly before his eyes.

"Doctor, don't touch-"

He turned and grabbed her, shouting into her frightened face, "Do you know what you've done? Do you know what you could do with this?" He crushed her tighter in his arms. "It was – it was helicopters that could rescue a hundred people at once, it was burn victims floating while their skin healed, it was…it was…it was flying cars! Flying cars, Ann! It would change the Earth, it would change everything, and it would be for the better, for the greater good!"

"Listen to me!" Her breath was too fast, and he could feel her bizarre heartbeat throbbing against his chest. "Out there in space, Doctor, there's a race of people, wonderful clever people, skin every shade of sunset, and they are working. All of them, from childhood to death, they do nothing but work. There is no war because there's no energy for war; there's no hunger because everyone gets enough to work and no more. And they work, every hour of every day; they have worked for five thousand years, to pay off a debt. Want to know how they got into debt?"

He just stared at her.

"Six thousand years ago, a probe crashed on their planet. And the one who found it and took it apart was very smart; she figured out how the power system worked. And she started making more power systems. Wonderful power systems; systems that changed that world for the better.

"Then a few centuries afterwards, the Intergalactic Patent Patrol found them. And they calculated the cost of every erg of energy that had been moved by those alien systems, added on a thick stack of penalties, and made it clear that the planet would pay or they'd be burned down to bedrock, and the planet reseeded with algae to start over from scratch."

She took in a slightly labored breath. "So in maybe three hundred years, Doctor, their debt will be paid. They will have stripped their planet of its last bit of value, but they will be alive. They'll be the laughingstock of the sector for a few millennia, I imagine; if someone doesn't just show up and conquer them when they are too weak to fight back."

She blinked. "I'm sorry, Doctor; I'm so sorry. But Earth can't afford that engine." A pause. "I mean it, you can't." A longer pause. "Could you put me down, please?"

He looked and realized that he was holding her a foot off the tarmac; her toes dangled helplessly against his calves. Slowly, he loosened his grip, and fortunately she stepped away as soon as she touched down, or else he might have shoved her.

"You – will tell me what you hear from Dracula," Doc finally said, brushing himself off with quick jerky strokes of his fingers, pulling his coat free of its Velcro tabs with a rough ripping noise.

"Of course, Doctor, of course," she said, drawing in a few long breaths. Ghost wove himself between her feet, staring up at Doc with an indecipherable expression.


	15. King of Pain

Doc drove down Caddis Way, then turned and headed for his office. And in his mind, what felt like a dozen howling voices were arguing. You should go study inertia and see how an anti-inertia device would work. You should turn her over to the government. You should study those medical files. You should remember what you saw. You should read anything you can find about alien ghosts. You should ask her out. You should research the aliens that she said helped create Earth computer systems.

You should – remember what you saw?

Doc pulled into his own parking lot and then stopped, not parked but waiting, thinking.

When he'd been going down Caddis Way, he'd seen something out of the corner of his eye. Some cars, parked on the slab foundation of one of the unfinished houses. But Ann had said that she'd thrown out all the workers for the day, so why would they be parked there still?

He paused, indecisive. There were other cars in his lot, patients' cars. People waiting for him.

Who might be waiting for Ann? Her lawyers? But there was someone else who might be waiting for her, someone else who might be severely pissed at her.

King Radical.

He burst out of the car like a startled pheasant and he ran, flat-out, striking through the Haunted Woods like a white blade aimed squarely at Ann Wales and whoever might threaten her.

* * *

"This is crazy," Ann said, teeth clenched, trying to ignore the pain in her arm where the red-haired man was holding it. "Why are you doing this?"

"You've been a problem," said the soft-voiced one on the couch, lounging back and taking apparent delight in her distress. "You wouldn't take a hint to just pack up and leave. King Radical just wants you to see a little reason."

"Maybe we can drive it home to you," growled the redhead, his grip kneading at her.

As soon as she had walked in they had piled on her, pinning her to the floor and ripping open her pockets to make sure she wasn't carrying a weapon. Everything she'd brought down from orbit was somewhere down on the carpet, and she couldn't think of a way to get away from them long enough to find what she needed.

"Doctor McNinja," she said, pronouncing the name with care to see them flinch, "might take my being attacked by King Radical's men….very personally."

"That's the idea," the man on the couch said, gesturing to another man who raised a gun and showed it to her. She didn't recognize the model, but it was a big ugly thing, belt-fed and very dangerous-looking. "You call him in tears, he comes running to the rescue, and we make him into Swiss cheese. Of course, we are going to need you to cry. Really cry." He rose and stepped towards her, slipping a set of brass knuckles onto one hand, and the men crowded close to her – all except one.

She turned her eyes to that one; he was leaning against the far wall, he had thinning black hair, and he had Ghost clamped under his arm, hard. The dog whined and wriggled, trying to get loose, and the black-haired man put the gun in his hand to Ghost's head and smiled evilly at her.

Ann inhaled deeply, and stiffened her resolve.

"Ghost?"

The dog yelped, once.

"Nunnberigannin!"

Ghost's eyes seemed to widen impossibly, glowing white like liquid steel. The redhead felt unbelievable pain explode in his skull as Ann smashed his nose and then fell, dragging herself downwards by sheer force. The man who was holding Ghost screamed and then lunged forward, gun out, firing blindly into the group. His mouth hung open in a mindless howl, and his eyes were spheres of white opal boiling in his head. One man collapsed; then he rose to his feet, clawing and howling at the men around him, even while the gunman screamed in horror and dropped his weapon. The room was suddenly like a forest in a storm; men shouting and shooting, thrashing at each other, and one and then another suddenly was struck blind and mad by some supernatural force.

Ann elbow-crawled out of the room, ducking as a bullet smashed against the wall behind her. Once in the kitchen, she rose to her feet and darted into the back room, slamming the door. Where she really wanted to go was her safe room, but she couldn't, not if a certain ninja was about to arrive. There was no time to find the light; instead she whispered, "Doctor, it's me! I'm safe, don't go in there! Don't! If you can hear me, stay out or come around the back!"

Silence. If he was within hearing distance, she expected the sound of the fight to draw him like a moth to flame. He might already be in here, of course: but there was nothing else she could do. Her cell phone was out there getting smashed – again. If he charged into the front room, and Ghost got him confused with Radical's men…she would have to trust to ninja sneakiness.

She whispered again, "Don't go in there!"

A sudden squeal from the hinges of the back door, and she threw herself at it, trying to ignore the threat of accidentally impaling herself on the long, sharp sword that was almost certainly in Doc's hand. "Where are you?" she hissed.

"What's happening in there?" he growled from behind her.

Damn, he'd gotten around her! It sounded like he was at the door to the rest of the house, about to walk into the killing zone. Ann turned and moved back, sweeping her hands side to side – slowly, very slowly. She didn't want to cut herself. Her fingertips brushed the back of his coat, and she quickly patted her way around to his front, pressing the fingers of both hands against his tensed biceps. She knew better than to grab at him; a ninja was slipperier than an oiled eel.

"I'm fine. That's," a horrific scream from the other room, the scream of a man having his throat torn out, "that's Ghost. He's killing them all."

"What?" he said; he was close enough in the dark that she could feel his breath on her face. She wondered if she could back him away from the door – probably not. She had come around his left side, so she had to assume that the bared sword was in his right hand.

"Those are Radical's men-" and she pressed her hands to his chest, hard, holding him back. "They said that they thought I was Russian, Russian Mafia. That I was moving in on the King's territory. One of them had a gun, a really really big gun, they were going to ambush you-"

The deep, drawn-out howl from the front room was nothing that a human throat could make.

"And so Ghost is – he's possessing them. Possessing them, and making them kill each other. You can't go in there!" she said quickly, feeling him starting to move forward. "If Ghost goes into you…I don't know if I can stop him before you, um, kill someone, or something."

Silence from the man in front of her; nothing but the sounds of dying behind her. Did he understand what was going on? Was he angry, confused, what? She was too far away from the light to turn it on, so she carefully raised her right hand and started tapping up his body to the head and masked face. His eyebrows were tightly knotted together under her fingertips, and she futilely rubbed at the knot.

"I'm safe," she tried. "You don't have to fight them. Ghost will kill them all."

More silence. She cursed the darkness to herself; how could she tell what he was feeling when she couldn't see his eyes? He was standing still at least, that was a good thing. The sound of bullets had petered out from the front room, and the crack of smashed furniture (she was going to have to get another couch after all). There was silence for a breath, for ten.

Then a noise. A long shriek. And another. And another.

"I – I really need to go take care of that," Ann finally murmured. She turned in the darkness and opened the door, moving towards the front of the house and Ghost's battlefield.

She opened the door and saw the slaughter. Blood everywhere, and a steady hiss of forced wind where a bullet had pierced the glass fireplace shield. The fire was roaring in the unaccustomed draft, illuminating the last of King Radical's men as he stood in the center of the room and screamed. Blood was streaming down his neck where he clawed at it, and his eyes looked like pearls set in bloodied coral sockets.

"Good boy, Ghost!" Ann chirped, sounding as perky as she could manage under the circumstances. "Good boy! Now squeeze, boy! Squeeze…."

The possessed man's hands dragged up his body clumsily, then set themselves into his throat and started to tighten. His scream was choked off, and his dead-white face started to flush purple. Foam spattered from his mouth and dripped onto his shirt.

"That isn't going to work," Doc criticized from behind her. "He'll just pass out and his grip will relax."

"A ghost can move a dead body – it can make a man choke himself to death."

"I can't just let-"

"Stop!" she snapped. "You touch him and Ghost will jump into you. He's a good dog, but he's not perfect. He makes mistakes, sometimes…."

The gangster fell to his knees, then face down on the wet floor. There was a horrid crunch of fracturing cartilage, and he shuddered and lay still. His body started to smoke, and the smoke congealed into Ghost, pert and immaculate, standing on the dead man's back and looking very pleased with himself. He yipped.

"Good boy," Ann said, walking over to him; her sneakers made wet slurping sounds in the carpet, but she ignored it. "Good boy," she said again, picking him up and cuddling him, turning on one heel and staring at the dead and shattered bodies around her.

Finally she turned and looked at Doc, and her eyes were full of tears.

"I told them to leave," she said, voice tight. "I told them they were wrong about me – why wouldn't they listen to me! Why wouldn't they just go!"

Ghost whined and licked her face, and she hugged him again. "No, Ghost. Good dog, good dog." Then she put him down, a little too slowly, and started to search the floor for something, bent over.

* * *

Doc thought he recognized one of the dead men – what a mess he'd made of himself, he seemed to have killed himself by – ugh. So he dragged his eyes away from the corpse and asked tentatively, "Can I help?"

"You – no, found it!" Ann picked up a tiny black cone from the floor and grinned at it. With slow and deliberate movements, she balanced it on the tip of one finger – and then stuck her finger in her ear. When she pulled her finger out, the cone was gone.

She took a long deep breath, and another, and he could almost hear her self-control cracking, as she let something loose in herself that she had been holding back.

"My assignment has begun," Ann said. "I have made first contact with my target. And I have reestablished communication with Horanckk. Which means that I have control of a mercenary weapons platform that is, indeed, fully armed and operational, and I am completely authorized to use it!"

Ann was grinning, and her grin was sharper than a snarl.

"Horanckk, reply – good. Begin a surface scan. Start with the vehicles parked near my location. Track them back to their departure points. Find out where they came from."

"What are you going to –"

"Find their houses, and their families. Make them pay. Kill them all-"

He looked into her eyes and saw pure alien madness.

"No. No, Ann. Time out, stop." He gestured a T in the air in front of her, and her eyes left their staring into infinity and locked on his.

"Horanckk's sensors can see through this roof. And his weapons can cut through a roof - or a mountain - with equal ease. I have the power, and I will use it to defend myself – and the way I defend myself is to leave no one living to move against me."

Doc felt a hot spark of fear ignite in his chest.

"So you will stand aside, Doctor! King Radical will pay for what he has done, what he has made me do-"

Doc thought very quickly, and he did the only thing that seemed like it might work. He picked Ann up by the elbows, chucked her in the direction of the splintered couch, and dove after her. She twisted in midair, snarling, but still fell onto the punctured cushions. He fell on top of her, hard; grabbing the edges of the couch's frame and pulling himself down, covering her completely with his body, pressing her head down with his until they rested ear to ear.

"Horanckk!" he shouted. "Horanckk, if you can hear me, you can't shoot me without hitting Ann! Don't shoot!" She writhed under him like a serpent, and he fought, trying to hold her down, trap her legs between his, and keep her from wriggling free. She was strong, viciously strong, and his hands quickly came loose to block her strikes. Could Horanckk be able to target just a limb? He imagined a laser slicing him off at the knees, literally, and hung on grimly as Ann snapped and frothed at him.

A tiny voice percolated out of Ann's ear into his. "Now this has to be a courtship ritual."

"No it is NOT!" Doc and Ann said as one.

"Ann, I won't let you do this," Doc said, fast, talking over whatever she might say. "I can't let you kill these men's families. You've got to stop, Ann."

"Ghost!"

He clamped his hand over her mouth before she could spit some lethal order, feeling muscles ripple as she fought to get free. The dog pranced up and yipped at them, tail wagging; apparently he thought they were playing.

"Remember your oath!" Horanckk's voice again, and Ann suddenly went limp under Doc. He could barely see her eyes from his current position, pressed cheek-to-cheek with her, but he thought he saw tears in them. She blinked, and her deaths'-head smile faded away under his hand.

"Oath, what oath?" he asked, and she growled at him.

"Is it 'First, do no harm'?"

She rolled her eyes to try and see him, and failed. He loosened his hold just enough to let her speak, and she whispered, "No." Her fingers were still locked painfully on his arms, she let go and let them flop loose at her sides. "Thank you, Horanckk."

"You're welcome, Madam. Are you in immediate danger?"

She let her face turn a hair towards the Doctor, and met his gaze out of the corner of her eye. "Am I, Doctor? Will you take revenge for these men?"

"No," he replied grimly. He could feel the big gun she'd mentioned digging into his elbow. "But their families are another thing."

"Madam, I am not certain you are safe. There are five vehicles approaching your current position: four automobiles, and one smaller two wheeled vehicle."

"Smaller?"

"King Radical's coming here?" Doc said, tensing with excitement. "I could get him?"

"I could get him too," Ann said, the growl back in her voice. "He'll be a thin vapor by the time I'm done with him. And then I could-"

He could feel the tension rising up in her muscles at those words. "No." Carefully, Doc raised his head from Ann's face, turning so that they looked square into each other's eyes. As much as he might like to see King Radical literally vaporized, he was afraid that if Ann did that, she would go on to Radical's men, and on and on.

At least when he went nuts, it was just with a sword. She had a satellite!

He told her, "Vapor can't answer my questions. I want him alive. I want to know what he's doing. I want Horanckk to track where he came from – and where he goes."

Ann stared up at him, apparently completely unaware of how closely they were entwined. "What if I could arrange for them all to leave on foot?"

"That would do it…Horanckk is that accurate?"

"That he is." Ann raised her chin. "Contract, Doctor: I let King Radical leave here alive, and you follow him."

"Contract," he agreed.

"Horanckk: witness. Get the projectiles and the X-ray lasers ready. I'm going to want something noisy."

"Noisy?" he asked, gingerly climbing to his feet. Ann rose as well.

"We need to frighten them into bolting. Ghost, come." She picked the little dog up, then slicked her hand through the blood-soaked carpet, rubbing the red wetness into Ghost's fur. She flicked her fingers in her own face, spattering herself with blood.

"How do I look?" she asked.

"Completely insane," he said, quite honestly."

"Glad to hear it," she glowed. "When the fire comes down, Doctor, get under cover – it'll be raining molten iron before I'm done."

The faint sound of engines in the distance: car engines, and the higher buzz of a dirt bike. Doc tensed at the sound, gathering himself, plotting his course: out the back door, up into the trees, between the driveway and the exit from Caddis Way – yes, he could do this.

"Oh, and Doctor?"

"What?" he asked, and she came and stood close to him, very close. With a gesture not quite human, she stretched up on her toes and bumped her nose against his.

"Good hunting."

He smiled at her, and then spun and vanished into the darkness. Outside, in the trees, he could see the headlights moving towards him. It was starting to mist a little as night fell, but the branches were still dry enough to afford him a good grip. He waited, silent.

King Radical was at the front, bright in his king's attire. Behind him came four cars, probably full of his goons. The dirt bike buzzed into the gravel in front of Ann's house, and then stopped; the four cars pulled in as well, and their doors opened as the men inside got out. Good, good. Fewer men in the cars meant less risk of them being wounded when Horanckk did whatever he was going to do.

The door to Ann's house opened, and as though that was a signal, King Radical hopped off his bike and strode forward. A figure moved towards him in turn, shrouded in a black umbrella that covered from head to chest.

"Miss Ann Wales, I presume?" King Radical stood straight, his curled grey beard jutting out aggressively. "I apparently have failed in making it clear just how unwelcome you are here."

Multiple clickings from the men around the cars, as they released the safeties on their weapons.

"So I am taking the unusual step of telling you face to face, that you must….must…."

His voice ran out in a squeak, because Ann had tilted up the umbrella. She was pale and shell-shocked, tears running down her red-spattered face. And cuddled against her was the tiny white shape of her dog, limp. Her chin quivered, and then she sobbed, loudly. She seemed to pull herself together, but then Ghost whined as though in pain and she sobbed again.

The whole thing was painful enough that even Doc felt the impulse to comfort her. She looked so tiny, all bloody and battered, and the wounded animal in her arms was the final touch.

"Y-you," Ann said, and sniffled hugely. "You did this. You're King Radical. You, your men stole my property, you threatened me, and then you attacked me! Attacked me in my own house, attacked my dog!" She sounded on the brink of hysterics. "What is wrong with you? What did I ever do to you?"

"I," Radical swallowed, "You are with the Russian Mafia-"

"LIES!" she screamed, her voice on the edge of hysteria. "I have no connection with the Mafia, none! I never did anything to you! I j-just wanted to build my own place," she sobbed deeper, "my own place here, and be safe. Why can't you just leave me alone? Why did you attack me?"

Doc could see Radical's men lowering their weapons, see the sudden uncertainly in their leader's posture, his shoulders shrinking under his cape, his head drooping as though in sympathy. Crying hysterically might not be a tactic that would work for a ninja, but she was milking it for all it was worth. And if things went south, she could just sic Ghost on them.

"I didn't attack you!" he shouted in protest.

"It was your men, they said you sent them. It was an ambush-"

"What? No. No, that is – completely not cool. That is completely not what is happening here. I – can I offer you a ride to the vet? Your dog…."

"Don't you touch him!" she wailed, holding Ghost close to her. "I am not going anywhere with you!" Doc tensed in the branches overhead. "I want you to go. Now. Right now, go and never come back! Leave me alone! And get your men out of my house!"

"They're still in there?!" He almost snarled, lip curling in fury. "You, you, get them out here!"

Two of Radical's men quickly broke ranks and went into the house. After a long moment, one of them exited and fell to his knees, puking under the hard security lights.

"Oh God," the other wailed from inside the house, "they're dead. They're all dead!"

"McNinja!" Radical hissed.

"Doctor McNinja did not kill any of them," she said, loudly enough to be heard by all the listeners. Her face was suddenly cold and rigid, the wet tears on her cheeks ignored. "He did not need to. They trespassed against me, and they paid the price. So. Clean up the mess you made!"

Under her burning gaze they brought out the limp long forms, blood and bile dripping from them in little patterns on the gravel. King Radical ground his teeth at the sight.

"Take your men. Go," she ordered again. Her face looked like it was carved out of white stone. "You have my word; I have no interest in seizing power from you. I only want to be left alone. Strictly alone."

"I need some answers before I go, Miss Wales," he snapped. "I need to know who – I need to know why, why I was told you were with the Russian Mafia."

"Why is who, Radical. Who told you I was with the Mafia? Was it someone who could also convince your men to attack me? Or someone who could say they were speaking in your name, that you had given that order?"

Doc's eyes were drawn to one of Radical's men: one that he recognized. Russet hair, glasses, and a too-square mouth: this was one of the men who had been involved in firebombing his office. Another man leaned close to him to whisper, and with an angry gesture he moved away from the cars, into a position where he had an unobstructed view of Ann – and Radical.

The man with glasses had a shotgun in one hand, hanging almost concealed against his leg; he swung it upwards with a single long sweep, pointing it at Radical.

Shuriken snapped from Doc's fingers, aiming at the gunman's arm to cut tendon and muscle.

The man exploded, turning in an instant into a hot rain of steaming blood. Ann cowered on the ground, hiding under her umbrella. Blood rained down on all of them, painting the King's crown red, pattering against the leaves and the cars. Men shouted or cursed.

Doc just had time to think, What?

Then a hammering train of blows out of nowhere, smashing into the cars; metal crushed under invisible blows, paint flecks rising like smoke, and then more blows smashing down around them, great craters opening in the earth. The noise was unbelievable: rending metal and pulped earth, and men screaming. Some of them threw their weapons from them in sheer terror, and those weapons blew apart as they flew through the air. The corpses of Ann's attackers exploded as well, sending pulp and gravel in all directions.

Doc had prudently put himself behind a tree trunk, and he watched the devastation with approval shading into horror. He imagined projectiles rendered inertialess and weightless, sent speeding down to Earth and then somehow re-inerted, letting a hundred miles of descent smash into the earth in an instant. He knew in that instant that inertialessness could be the greatest weapon Earth had ever suffered under, and wondered if maybe the Intergalactic Patent Patrol didn't have a point after all.

A noise rose above the chaos. From Doc's vantage point he could only see the merest sliver of Ann's profile as she reared her head back, mouth wide open, and roared.

"RUN!" she howled. "Run, and never return!"

An invisible knife seemed to slice through King Radical's dirt bike as he leaped for it; he stared in terror at the toppled remains, and then turned and ran. His men drew themselves out of the mud one by one (those that had not already run) and fled as well, some at random, some trying to follow their leader. And above them, silent as only a ninja can be, Doc followed.


	16. Fortress Around Your Heart

Several days later, Doc sat in his office and looked at a white shirt, freshly dry-cleaned and neatly folded. It wasn't his, of course. It was the shirt that he had borrowed from Ann, not that long ago. He supposed that he should return it. He could – drop it off at her door in the dead of night, sneak it back into her closet, or mail it to her, or just throw it away.

Was he seriously considering throwing the shirt away? He knew that he was going to go see her, and the shirt was the perfect reason to go. She was no threat to him…well, except for the alien ghost dog. And the killer satellite.

The satellite…he had chased Radical's men through the darkness and rain, and they had finally fooled him. First one of them had thrown his black raincoat over King Radical's gaudy attire; then at some point, he wasn't quite sure when, Radical had slipped his crown onto another man's head, and run away with another group. Doc had only caught some poor babbling foot soldier who wasn't able to give him the slightest idea of where Radical might have gone.

Still, he had certainly put the fear of McNinja into them. It had been – very good hunting. And if Horanckk had been tracking them, perhaps he could tell Doc where everyone had finally ended up hiding from him.

And maybe he could find an opportunity to tell Horanckk what he thought of the sort of files that would help in 'further interaction' with Ann. Some of the data on Horanckk's little strip had been medical – at least ten percent of it had been completely fascinating information about alien anatomy and biochemistry. But the other ninety percent was apparently pornography, sorted into folders by species type: he'd looked as far as the 'Igneous/Plasma' pairings and been too shocked to go further.

He'd been sleeping poorly, the last few nights: his nightmares growing louder and louder. Last night had been the worst yet: he'd been dancing with Ann, arms swaying, feet touching down in rhythm, and all around them the people of Earth were dying, dropping dead one by one and hundreds by hundreds by thousands by millions.

"Goodbye, Doctor," she said in his dream, drifting upwards into the starry sky, and every star was a tiny skull. "I'm going home."

And he had screamed at her, he pleaded and begged for her to stay, trying to make her understand that she had to stay, to get him to Mars. To get the cure, to conquer Death. And her voice came whispering down from the blackness, "Why didn't you tell me? Before it was too late?" And the blackness came down and smothered him, smothered everything….

Doc jerked himself back to here and now. The phone buzzed as Judy put a call through, but when Doc looked at the display to see who was on the line, it showed only a scrambled string of shifting letters. That would be his parents, then. They had been rather miffed at him for surviving his mission, once they had read the death duty paperwork and realized that Ann's estate would reimburse them in the high eight figures. His mother had come within an inch of suggesting that he dispose of Miss Wales himself, and then discreetly disappear and let his family collect the death duty.

But it wasn't Mom. It was Dad, demanding in rough tones to know 'how far' he'd gotten with Ann Wales. Doc seriously considered answering 'low Earth orbit,' but realized that this would take too long to explain. Instead he gave some soothing non-committal words: still working on it, maybe another mission, will see her again-

Temptation suddenly whispered in his ear.

"I did find out one thing. She's rich," Doc almost purred into the phone.

Dan snorted. "Doesn't dress like rich….how rich?"

He suppressed a grin. "Like, billionaire rich?" And that wasn't even counting whatever savings Ann had.

Dan seemed to have been struck silent by this revelation. "So I have to go slow, Dad. That kind of money can buy serious security."

Which gave Dan a clear shot to ask if his son doubted his own ninja skills – but surprisingly he didn't take it. He ended the conversation fairly quickly, and Doc stared thoughtfully at the phone.

"Money changes everything," he muttered, and almost jumped when the phone rang again. The display said 'Mayor Charles G' this time. He supposed he should take it.

"Doctor McNinja!" Chuck Goodrich sounded as sunny as one of his campaign ads. "Just wanted to know that everything is fine with you."

"Yes?" Doc answered, wondering what Chuck wanted.

"And I suppose you've heard that there will be no, let's say repercussions, over that little meteor swarm over on Caddis Way."

Doc's brow crinkled. "Meteor swarm?"

"That's what the police decided it was. Lots of nickel iron shards, high heat traces…nothing to be done for the vehicles and people who got caught in it except clean up. It's not illegal to have a meteor swarm fall on your property!" Chuck gave a little laugh. "Especially when one of the men caught in it was a member of-"

"The Russian Mafia," Doc interrupted. Of course: this whole thing had been set up by a competing Mafia. Set Radical against Ann, take them both out and himself if they were lucky, move into the power vacuum. He wondered what Horanckk could do about the Russian Mafia. Melt down their province?

Chuck was still talking. "So you can just let Miss Wales know that, all right?"

Doc's racing mind finally let the right pieces click into place: Ann must have blamed everything on the Russian Mafia, and left King Radical free and clear. And Chuck was going along with this because he thought Ann and Doc were-

"Sorry, I've got another call coming in. Bye!" Chuck said, and hung up.

Doc looked at the silent receiver and thought a remarkably filthy phrase. He looked at his calendar of appointments and saw a space coming up: just enough free time to let him drive to Caddis Way and back, but not enough time to tempt him to linger.

Not that he was tempted, of course.

* * *

He had thought he was joking about how much security money could buy. Instead he was parked where Caddis Way had been. The street sign was gone. The turn-off was still there, but the asphalt had been carefully painted to match the color of the brown grass. And the road ended about fifteen feet away, in a very solid-looking gate.

He could just leave the shirt here – no, no he couldn't. Cutting Ann Wales out of his life wasn't feasible. She was here, she had her own personal Death Star apparently, and she also knew how to build an anti-inertia drive. And he needed that drive. He had to know more. So he turned the wheel and pulled into the stub of Caddis Way, and paused with the bumper of the Honda nearly touching the gate, waiting.

There was motion at the gateposts; long tubes swiveling to scan him. He tensed, then relaxed: cameras. The gate opened and he drove forward a little more confidently – a confidence that collapsed as soon as he saw another gate twenty feet ahead. And saw the first gate closing behind him, neatly locking him into a pen.

He could leave. The fence wasn't that high, he could run, he could –"Augh!" That at the sound of a tapping at the driver side window. He looked outside, and a showerhead looked back.

The showerhead was attached to a long curled-cable body, festooned with legs like a centipede's. And every tiny hole in the showerhead had been replaced by a glass bead – or a lens. The showerhead tapped again at his window with one feeler-like limb, and then drew it down the glass as though to mime opening the window.

Slowly, very slowly, Doctor McNinja lowered the window. The showerhead leaned forward in almost a parody of human body language, and asked in a whispery voice, "What is your name?"

"D – Doctor McNinja."

"What day is it?"

It was the same questions Ann had asked when she'd been checking him for concussion. "Thursday – and the third answer is blue," he said a little more confidently.

The showerhead twisted itself, more of its feet tapping against the Honda's side. "Who owns the blue thing?"

The blue thing was Babe the blue ox, so the answer was - "Paul Bunyan."

The showerhead craned upwards, all of its free limbs standing straight out from its body like antennae. Then it relaxed, or seemed to relax, and looped two arms and a coil of tail around the drivers-side mirror.

"You may enter the grounds," the showerhead said. "Please stay in your vehicle. Please move through the second gate," the gate opened and he did just that, "and then stop for bomb inspection."

Bomb inspection. Of course. To distract himself from the sounds of a dozen little robots crawling around on the undercarriage of his car, he asked the showerhead, "Horanckk?"

It stared back at him, with its hundreds of lens-eyes.

"I mean, are you Horanckk? Or – controlled by Horanckk?"

"The inspection is complete. Please move forward. Miss Wales is on the airfield. Please park your vehicle where we direct." And the showerhead just hung there while he moved down the empty street. But about halfway down, he stepped on the brakes.

"Why did you stop?" the showerhead asked.

"Is that a tank?" Doc asked, pointing out the passenger-side window to one of the empty slab foundation of the unbuilt houses. Sitting on the concrete was a shape of long rotary treads and multiple gun barrels, shrouded in layers of camouflage netting. But his eyes were quick to pick out the turret, the armored skirts, "Is that a hovertank?"

The showerhead made a clicking noise. "It is a rare collectible being stored for future resale."

"A rare, fully operational collectible?"

"Please move forward."

Doc did, making a note to himself to absolutely NOT tell his father about the tank. He'd probably try to steal it.

There were more gates to pass through, and more cameras. There were things lurking in the bushes around them, things like great gaunt spiders with too many legs, and ladders that trotted out of view when he glimpsed them. Fully mechanized security then, with no effort to blend in the way that Sean's robot animals did. But finally he was through the last gate.

Ann's car was here, parked by the stubby control tower. He opened his door a fraction, and the showerhead obediently unfastened itself and scuttled back. Doc paused a long moment before he opened the door the full width and stepped out, the borrowed shirt in a brown bag in his hand. The fences were all electrified now, he could smell the ozone; and they were topped with razor wire. More robot-things crawled around the edges, and there were faint shapes circling overhead that were almost certainly part of the security systems.

In the control tower, he could see just the glimpse of a blonde head. Ann. He trotted rather than walked to the tower – he didn't like being this exposed – and the showerhead came scrambling after him, wriggling across the tarmac.

"Doctor McNinja, please wait…." The showerhead was drooping as it spoke, its words coming slower, like a wind-up toy running out of energy.

"Are you all right?" he asked, and asked himself why he was feeling sympathy for the plight of a talking piece of plumbing. A talking piece of plumbing that was probably armed, or packed with explosives, or something.

"Low on power. If you could lift me to that bracket?" He did, gingerly taking it in a grip behind the 'head,' and watched fascinated as it picked open a concealed electrical socket and stuck its tail into it, clamping tighter to the bracket and wriggling in what seemed very much like happiness.

"Thank you, Doctor. Miss Wales is expecting you."

He waited for a minute, but the showerhead was ignoring him. So he bit his lip, and went up the metal stairs, shoe soles not whispering against the steps. At the top of the stairs was a metal iris that opened for him; he noted grimly that the edges of the iris were razor-sharp and could definitely do some damage to someone caught in them.

He didn't wait to be caught; he leaped, faster than the eyes could follow, pushed off the roof of the control tower with his free hand, and landed in a fighting crouch on the metal floor, facing the back of a chair. The iris snicked shut. The chair turned, and Ann Wales stared at him with deadly serious eyes.

He stared back. Ann must have been doing business today, because she was wearing a grey pantsuit that looked custom-tailored and very expensive. His eyes picked out the bulge of a shoulder holster under one arm, and other little odd bulges here and there. She still wore no jewelry, but her hair was carefully combed back and fastened with a hairclip that looked like real gold. A crisp, professional businesswoman, except for the eyes. Eyes a little too pale to look exactly human.

"Doctor McNinja," she said softly. "Good afternoon. Why are you here?"

Brief and to the point. "I'm returning your shirt," he said, holding out the paper bag to her.

"Couldn't you just have mailed it to me? Or thrown it over the fence?"

"I wanted to ask about Dracula."

Her eyelids drooped. "I don't have any good news for you, I'm afraid."

"He hasn't accepted the contract?"

"Correct."

"Well, you know, he is undead. He could think about it for the next twenty or thirty years, if he wanted to." He glanced around the room, seeing multiple laptops plugged into each other or into boxes with little gold-tipped alien chips poking out of them, and woven through all the equipment was steel cable, lots of steel cable. Locked with lots and lots of locks. In a little niche by Ann's feet, Ghost seemed to be sleeping, nose to tail.

Aha, he thought.

"Thank you for the shirt, Doctor. I will contact you if I have further news. Doctor? Doctor?"

"Sorry," he said, blinking himself back to reality. "I just figured out how you got past Mitzi, that's all." He looked over at her and gave his most innocent look, and then said brightly, "Guess it's time for me to go, then!"

Ann's face did not move, and her arms stayed perfectly immobile. With the toe of one shoe, she touched a control and the iris over the stairwell opened.

"Do you want to leave now, or tell me your – theory – of how I got past Mitzi?"

He smiled to himself. "Well, I just saw Ghost sitting there, and remembered how you made him possess Radical's men so that they all killed themselves, right? But what if you taught him to possess someone and then just sit still? You could walk right past a possessed person and they wouldn't see you. And then you signal, and Ghost vanishes away. And the only things you brought in your purse to dinner at my Mom's were your car keys, a flashlight – and a dog whistle." Doc rocked back on his heels, very pleased with himself.

Ann looked up at him, face still smooth and calm. "So I use the whistle to signal Ghost to possess and then to depart? I see a problem with this: how will Ghost tell me that he has possessed his target? Obviously, if he can't find Mitzi and I walk in on her, that's the end of that."

"How would Ghost signal you? He'd just," and Doc suddenly choked. "He'd just bark." And then suddenly he bent over, hands on knees, giggling at the image of his mother sitting on her heels in her cave, barking.

"It's an amusing thought," Ann said, smiling a little. "Of course I can't confirm or deny it. That would spoil the mystery – and as I said before, your mother might kill me."

"But-"

She waved one hand through the air, sharply. "Tell me, Doctor, would your parents accept a contract to never attack me – or would they take the money and then take money from the NSA, or Radical, and attack me anyway? Are they honorable enough to stay bought – or are they ninja?"

Doc didn't answer; he didn't have to. It was entirely possible that his parents – or at least his mother – would break a contract just to get rid of Ann and whatever threat they imagined she represented to their son. He pictured Ann dying under his mother's sais, and then pictured his family's home shredded by Horanckk's lasers, or crushed to splinters as he demolished the mountain over them. Ann had been caught by surprise by Radical's men; he doubted that sort of surprise would happen again.

Mars, his inner voice reminded him. She can get you to Mars, you can't let her scare you off! There has to be a way to get her on your side – or vice versa.

He looked up, about to say something but not certain of what. What he finally said was, "You said you didn't have any good news from Dracula."

"Correct."

"Does that mean there's no news from Dracula?"

She spun in her chair, giving him a clear view of the back of her neck. Her voice was a little softer as she said, "No. It means that the news is not good." She sighed. "But by our contract, I can't keep it from you…Dracula blew up the satellite."

"He did what?!"

She turned back to him, face colder than ever. "He blew it up, Doctor. Two ranging shots from his moon laser, and then he locked on and charred it until it couldn't maintain orbital stability. It's a dusting of ash over the Atlantic by now." She turned her hands out, palms up. "I believe I can count that as refusing the job offer."

"Oh. Oh, I mean," he remembered Horanckk, giving him Ann's medical records, speaking kindly to her, somehow snapping out of her killing rage, "I'm really sorry. About Horanckk."

"Oh, he's fine."

"He's what?"

"Horanckk has backup copies of himself, back with the Fleet. He had plenty of time to bundle up everything that had happened to him since we left, and transmit that back. So now," one of her hands fell onto the panel beside her and started to drum fingers in an oddly lopsided rhythm, "now, he'll go into a queue for processing. Once he's determined to be of Fleet origin and uncorrupted, he'll be put back into the systems and merged down into his previous copy, and deliver the message that Dracula has destroyed the satellite and trapped me here.

"And then," she sighed again, "some accountant will look at the figures and calculate: is it worth sending a second negotiator? A backup satellite? A rescue mission? Or should I just be written off as a loss?"

"What sort of people-" he said indignantly.

"My people, Doctor; the mercenaries were more my family than my blood-family ever was. I felt safe with them. And now I'm not safe," she said, turning to him with frightened eyes. "I can't signal for pickup, not out here. I'm trapped down here, alone, and – and – and I really just want to crawl into a hole and hide."

"And this is your hole?" he asked, gesturing to take in the airfield and the woods beyond.

"Correct. Mayor Goodrich was very pleased when I explained that Caddis Corporation would be taking special efforts to conform to all local tax codes. The revenue that will generate can cover for a few eccentricities. So. Now I wait."

Doc looked at the stairwell, looked at her, and then asked, "Can I ask you about something?"

"If you must."

"I have these dreams, of the night of the ice storm. Me and you in your bathroom, fighting and – something else. Stuff that doesn't make sense. I was wondering if you could tell me what happened. All of it."

She rose in a single swift move, looking at him with a rather worried face.

"Doctor – that's probably not a good idea. What you said was – well, you were out of your head. You have my word, I'm not going to repeat anything personal you told me, to anyone."

"Could you tell me anyway?"

She dipped her gaze down and seemed to stare at the knot of his tie. "I don't have Horanckk to protect me anymore. I haven't a hope of beating you, Doctor. Can't you just go?"

"Not when I have nightmares. Every night. And you're in them, and I don't know why."

"Oh. Well, I suppose a doctor does need his rest. Quiet, we'll go outside," she said, indicating the sleeping dog. That suited Doc fine; he found ghosts very unnerving.

She turned and typed at one of her keyboards, and all of the laptops suddenly started to close by themselves, like startled mollusks. The lights dimmed, and Ann gestured for him to go first. He did, and after she stepped down after him, she touched a control and the stairwell sealed shut.

"Let's sit down," she said, and so they did. The stairs were rather narrow, and they had to sit close enough that their hips touched, but Doc barely noticed. He wanted only to know what had happened.

"The night of the storm-" he prompted.

"That night, I got you in the house, in the bathroom, and started trying to take off your wet clothes, and after you got tired of fighting me-"

"Stop there. If I fought you, you'd be dead."

Ann looked dubiously at him. "I can pretty well guarantee that I am not dead. What if you fought me while you were drunk?"

"You'd still be dead."

"Drunk and concussed?"

"Dead."

"Drunk, and concussed, and half-frozen-" she held up a hand to stop his reply, "and standing in bare feet on wet tile with your pants around your ankles, in the dark, AND fighting a non-human opponent who is using a completely unfamiliar combat style AND who is only fighting defensively?"

"Uh…draw?"

"Oh no, you were definitely winning. I took a dive and started screaming 'Stop hurting me' pretty fast."

"And after that."

"After that, you went limp on me. Collapsed on the floor, and I thought you weren't breathing. So I dragged you up, and got you to hang onto the shower curtain rod – you've seen it, it's solid pipe. So anyway, I was getting your clothes off, and you started hallucinating and running out of breath."

"What do you mean, running out of breath?"

"I mean, you would babble for ten seconds, stop breathing for thirty, and over and over…it was really scary."

"How do you know that I was hallucinating?"

"You were talking to something in the bathtub. You said it was – oh, this is stupid – you said it was a skeleton, in a tuxedo. Wearing a shower cap."

The metal step was cold under Doc, but he felt new coldness sprouting inside of him, burning through his blood. The cold of total fear.

Ann kept talking, not noticing his shivers. "So the skeleton and you were arguing, or you were talking to the skeleton and pretending it was talking back. You didn't want to go somewhere with it. And you kept running out of breath, so finally I, well, I just grabbed you and forced air down your throat, mouth to mouth through the mask-

Mouth to mouth, that's what he remembered. She hadn't been kissing him. Of course not.

"And then I just swore a blue streak at the bathtub, ordering the hallucination to go away and hoping that would make you believe it had gone away. And I kept giving you mouth-to-mouth, and eventually you started breathing steadily enough that I could get you to lie down and rest."

"And that's it."

"Sure, I think you stopped hallucinating then."

He put aside the rather startling idea that Ann could swear vilely enough to drive off Death (what a thing not to be able to remember!) and concentrated on something else. "I mean, that doesn't sound very personal. What did I say that was personal?"

Ann's mouth twisted. "I won't repeat-"

"Just say it."

"Well." She swallowed, audibly, and her eyes traced the path of a late monarch butterfly as it bumbled past. "You were standing in the bathroom, and I'd gotten out of my wet clothes and into some dry ones and dried you off as best as I could – I remember," she gave a little laugh, "I told you that you must have the silkiest, most manageable hair in the world. Either that, or a great barber."

"Or both. Well, go on."

"So, I'd set up to put you in front of the fire, it really was the warmest place in the house, but you just wouldn't move. You refused. You were hunched over, with your arms crossed over your chest, saying that you were fine where you were. And you weren't, you were so cold, and so was I. So, I picked you up."

"You picked me up." That he said flat, looking down at Ann.

She looked back, noticing his disbelief. "I'm stronger than I look, Doctor. I gave you sort of a front-piggyback, and your arms around my shoulders. And I carefully carried you out to the fireplace, and when I went to put you down you just held on tighter. And you told me that your father used to carry you like that, when you were a boy in training. He'd carry you, and tell you 'Well done,' and kiss you on the cheek. And that eventually, he'd stopped. And you never knew quite why."

Ann's head drooped. "And so I told you, 'You're alive. Well done.'"

Doc narrowed his eyes at her.

"And?"

"You presented the cheek," she said, looking extremely embarrassed. "It was more of a peck, really. I am sorry, I am, I know I shouldn't have, but you had finally calmed down and I was afraid we'd start fighting again and after I did it, you finally relaxed and lay down. And you told me not to let you leave, and that I should make you pinky-swear to stay, and you explained about pinky-swears. And I said I was going to sleep on the couch, and you, ah, asked very forcefully that I stay, so I said I'd hold your hand. And I did. And then you woke up, and you were back to normal."

He remembered that: waking up to Ann's hand dangling just above his chest, and his own hand. He must have fallen asleep holding her hand, and then woke up not remembering what he'd faced.

"Ann, I – do you know what you did?"

"I maybe saved your life-"

"Definitely."

"Definitely?"

"Didn't your study of Earth culture tell you who the skeleton is?"

"I, oh." Her hand flew to cover her mouth again, and she stared at him over it. "It was Death? Your Death? Sorry, no I didn't remember that….my Death is quite different, you see."

"Oh. Well, if he was there, then I really was on the brink of dying. He can be," Doc arched one eyebrow, "impatient."

"You look amazingly sarcastic right now."

"Thanks."

"So, that's the secret that I've been keeping for you. Are we done?"

She was sitting right beside him but she was a hundred miles away, a thousand: he could feel her receding, moving away from him. Burrowing into her hiding-hole, shutting herself up. And they weren't done, they couldn't be done, there was so much more to say, to do! He didn't know what to do. What do I do? he asked himself.

(You settle, his inner voice told him coldly.)

What the hell does that mean?

(When you were eleven years old you wrote out a list of what you wanted in a girl, remember?)

Remember? I – that was a stupid list, I was just a kid, and why do you remember it anyway?

(You crossed off things, as the years went on, until you were left with two things. She had to like you just the way you were, and she had to be able to beat Mitzi. So, settle. She can get you to Mars.)

What did I cross off again?

(Lots of stupid stuff, OK? She's never going to be a beautiful tall leggy busty redhead, for starters, and-)

He told his inner voice to shut up because it was being no help at all.

He looked at her, the alienness showing a little bit more at this angle; the heavy jaw and the ear set a little too far forward. Also the tiredness, and oddly enough the honesty. She didn't have to tell him that the satellite was gone. She could have told him that she hadn't heard back from Dracula, and let him think she still had a superweapon at her beck and call. But she hadn't. She could have killed him the night Radical's men attacked her. She could have stepped aside and let him charge into the room, and let Ghost tear him apart. She hadn't.

Ann's hand was sitting on her knee. He reached out with one hand and touched it, and wrote HI on the back with his finger.

A pause that stretched out forever. Then she raised and turned her hand, and wrote HI on his palm in reply. Her hand rested inside his grip, and he was terrified of closing that hand, certain that the slightest pressure would make her withdraw again.

"Don't go." He said those words in barely a whisper. "Talk to me."

"Sorry, I was lost in thought…I'm not going anywhere; I can't go anywhere. Talk about what, Doctor? I'm an alien mercenary accountant, you're a ninja doctor-"

"We fight crime!"

She shook her head slowly.

"We could fight crime?" he suggested.

"No, we don't have anything in common. What could we talk about?"

"Everything! Tell me about space, about spaceships, about Horanckk and the satellite. Tell me about your family, your planet, how you grew up. I mean, I don't know anything and you know everything, please, tell me! Tell me about medicine out there, tell me about the mercenaries, tell me about aliens, tell me about you."

"About me?"

"Tell me," he pressed her hand in his, gently, very gently, "I don't know anything about you. I don't know your name – I'm guessing it's not Ann Chwydiad – I don't know what you like about Earth, or what you don't like, or if you like-"

"Hold on, slow down." She held out one hand flat to him; the other one she left lying in his grasp, returning the pressure of his touch but no more. "I can't answer all those questions at once. And there's some questions I can't answer at all. So – pick one question. We'll start with that."

"One question." He relaxed and tried to choose, but there were so many – and then he put together several things he did remember.

(You can't ask her that! his inner voice screamed. She'll never speak to you again!)

"Why didn't you kill me?"

"What?"

"When I woke up on your floor, after the storm, there was a shovel leaning by your front door. And it was wet. And later at my parents' house, you mentioned that if I had been any other ninja, you would have hacked off my head with a shovel." He shrugged expressively. "I put two and two together. You went out there to kill me, and you didn't. Why? I was underwater, you couldn't see my white coat, so you didn't know that I was Doctor McNinja. You would have just seen a ninja. A man in a mask."

She slumped a little, which let her shoulder touch his; he tried not to show that he had noticed that contact.

"I don't know," she said finally. "All I could see were your eyes and – I don't know why I didn't kill you. I should have, I had every reason to think that you were responsible for the blackout. An assassin caught in his own trap, what could be more natural? But when I stood over you with the shovel – I couldn't do it."

She was staring straight at him now, not seeming to notice that they were only inches apart.

"Your eyes – they just held me. They stopped me." She gave a tiny, bitter smile. "I suppose that's some ninja trick they teach you, right? How to hold someone still with your gaze, while you reach out and strike-"

He touched her hair with his free hand, and found it strange and smooth under his fingers: more slippery than human hair, and feather-fine.

"No trick," he whispered, and then they silenced each other.

* * *

"Wow," they breathed against each other as they pulled apart, some indefinite time later. Ann's irises were huge black pools that Doc thought he could just sink into forever, but something a little more urgent was claiming his attention.

"You've done that before."

"Um, what? You mean when you were raving-"

"No, I mean, you've kissed someone through a mask."

"Oh that. Yes. Two masks, even: I've masked myself, for social occasions, or to disguise myself. Why? Does it bother you?"

"No, no, not at all! It's wonderful!" He laughed and smiled all at once, and would have gone in for a second kiss if he dared.

"And it's Anwei."

"What's Anwei?"

"My name is Anwei. You'd probably spell it A-n-w-e-i."

"Anwei," he said softly, trying to get the hard N and the breathy 'w' right. "And the rest of my questions?"

"Greedy, aren't you?"

He looked left, looked right, and then nodded, and she giggled, smiling more naturally now, not covering her mouth.

Then she fell serious. "Um, first – does this mean that your mother is going to try killing me again?"

"Not if you don't come to dinner."

"She's not going to drop a mortar round on the hospital while I'm there? Or sneak in here and poison my pantry?"

"No. I won't let her."

Ann lowered her head and looked up at him through her eyebrows, not quite certain it seemed of the truth of that. "All right," she said anyway. "Well, so. I think that the answers to your questions won't be free. After all, if I am stranded here, I need to get caught up in Earth culture, you know? Figure out what I missed, learn how to blend in. Can you help me?"

"How?" He didn't want to risk putting his arm around her shoulder, but he did lean a little closer, and she didn't lean away.

"Well, how about in exchange for my telling you all that I can about aliens, and spaceships, and mercenaries, and me, you tell me every single thing there is to know about….Batman."

(I swear if you don't take her up on that, I will, Doc's inner voice nearly screamed. That is the best pick-me-up line ever; take it!)

"Yes," he said, with a bounce in his voice. "Contract?"

She raised her hand, still entwined in his, and folded down all her fingers except the pinky. Blushing again, he did the same, and they linked their fingers.

"All the stars for Batman," she promised.

"Fair trade," he agreed.


	17. Who Ya Gonna Call

Ann walked through the Haunted Forest, hearing dead grass and leaves crunch under her feet. They crunched louder than they normally did, because she was carrying a heavy metal box and a paint can. The paint can had pale grey spatters around the rim, and the box hummed occasionally.

She did not much like this part of her stay on Earth. She was unused to trees: they seemed very inefficient. And there was a certain amount of danger involved as well; she'd had her security drones leave this area, to let her work undisturbed. But she gritted her teeth and kept going. It was for Ghost, who was probably her best friend now that Horanckk was incommunicado. It wasn't his fault that he was a ghost dog, and didn't know he was a ghost, and got hungry – and the only thing he could eat was ectoplasm.

However, all things considered, she was enjoying her exile on Earth far more than she had thought she would.

She and Doctor McNinja had not gotten much further than some decorous necking, but she didn't mind. It had not taken her long to realize that he was taking every opportunity to explore her alien muscle structure; she simply asked to be allowed to touch him in turn instead of just sitting there, and when he agreed they both enjoyed themselves much more. The day would come when they would go further, she thought: but not any time soon. That was all right.

And she had learned quite a bit about Batman, as well.

She finally chose a nice clearing, one she hadn't used before – at least she thought not. She'd burned the grass rather badly in some spots before she figured out her current solution. With a groan she put down the box, a bit off-center to the clearing. She looked around: dark-barked trees whose branches looked faintly twisted in pain, eerie shadows lurking by every rock, and an uncanny lack of symmetry to the way the trunks clustered too close around her.

Perfect.

She opened the can first, and fished a grey-smeared brush out of her pocket. Carefully, making sure there were no breaks, she painted a thick grey-white paste in a circle. She left one segment open, so it looked like a giant C on the ground. Then more swiftly, she painted a bar across the middle of the C, leaving one half (with her equipment) surrounded, and one half open to the woods and what waited in them.

She resealed her paint can and opened the metal box. Inside, her ectoplasm collecting equipment burbled contently. She made sure all the jars were completely tight to their connections, donned heavy leather gloves that were bound with copper and had copper cables trailing from their cuffs to the ground, and started to assemble the aerial. Click, twist, snap: when she was done she had a long flexible length of woven copper, spiraled here and there with connectors, and standing nearly twice her height. She carefully fastened a thicker copper cable to its handle, and then placed it in a bracket on one side of her collector: it waited there, point upright.

Then she stepped into the other half of the circle – the one with one side open - and started to cry. Little muffled sobs, the tears of someone almost too tired to cry.

"I'm lost!" she wept, kneeling and staring at the trees around her with tear-stained and utterly serious eyes. "I can't find my way out of there! I'm so, so, lost!"

One of the trees seemed to stir. It wasn't actually moving, but the shadow that streamed from its base was moving, creeping towards her, slipping and twisting like a living thing as it approached. She was glad to see that it was heading directly for the gap in the circle; of course, that was its only line of sight.

"Oh no," she sobbed, concentrating on her terror and her tears. "Oh no, no, get away! Go away, go away go away!" she shouted, rising from her knees. The shadow was close to her now, close enough to see that its featureless blackness was marred by gleaming speckles that might have been light through tree branches – or eyes.

She took one giant step backwards, over the line dividing the circle, and the shadow suddenly slowed, its tip questing back and forth.

"Gotcha," she muttered, scooping up the aerial and slashing it downwards into the shadow. The results were spectacular.

White fluids seemed to stream out of the shadow, into the metal rod piercing it; it twisted like a salted slug, visibly shrinking as it did. Ann held the aerial steady, feeling the pulse and throb of ectoplasmic energies as they were absorbed from the ghost into her machinery. The shadow shrunk smaller…smaller…smaller…and then it was gone.

Ann raised the aerial, carefully shook it, and racked it. She examined the jars, and frowned: for all its aggressiveness, she'd only gotten two and a half jars worth of ectoplasm out of that one. It must have been a new ghost. But it was promising that it had come to her so soon. This was probably a good place to-

"Hey," said a familiar voice.

"Gordito!" she squeaked, turning and jumping in one motion. He was there in the circle beside her, staring up at her with suspicious brown eyes.

"What are you doing in Doc's woods?" he asked.

"I'm, hold on," she flipped up a GPS watch that she'd strung through a belt loop, "I'm in my woods. Your woods are over there," she said, pointing and hoping the boy would leave.

No such luck.

"What's this?" he said, looking at the collector.

"Just some experimental equipment. Very experimental. Might explode at any time."

He wasn't taking the hint.

"So," he said, looking out over the woods, "you and Doc are seeing each other."

"Sometimes," she answered, still cautious.

"I wanted to ask – that first time we met, you completely freaked out when you saw me. Why?" He sounded genuinely curious, and not hurt, which was good.

She swallowed, thinking: Doc had said that he was going to tell Gordito the truth about her origin, after reassuring her as to his absolute trustworthiness. And to answer his question honestly, she'd have to talk about her own past. So-

"Well, you see – when I was a couple of years younger than you are now, I had a moustache too."

Gordito's eyes widened. "You did?"

"I did. Great long blonde one, made me look like Fu Manchu. And I was – a very angry and dangerous person when I had that moustache, Gordito, so when I saw you I thought you were dangerous too." A shrug. "Which was true, after all."

"So you shaved it off?"

"Shave? Oh, it fell out when I reached puberty," she said, her eyes flicking skyward as she recalled some very unpleasant memories. "That's the way it goes with my-"

She looked back down and Gordito was staring at her with utter horror in his eyes.

"What?" she asked, confused.

"It fell out? You lost your moustache? You mean that I'm going to grow up and it's going to fall out?!"

"No, no Gordito, I mean maybe but it doesn't, I mean," she clenched her fists at her sides, this was hard to say, "it's normal for my species."

That got his attention. He removed his hands from his moustache which he'd been patting for reassurance, and said triumphantly, "I knew it!"

"You did? I mean – wait, did you talk to Doc about-"

"I knew it!" he said again, pointing at her face. "The way you cover your mouth, you can talk to animals, you got past Mitzi – I know what you are!"

"Oh, good." That was a relief.

"You're a werewolf!"

And that was not a relief. "What? No I'm not! Oh dear, Doc should have told you-"

"So can you change into a wolf anytime? Do you hunt here, in the Haunted Forest? Does – does Doc know?"

"Doc knows the truth," which was accurate, if misleading, "but I don't think he's told you all of it. Why don't you go ask him about it?"

"Good idea. Hey, but you never told me - what does this stuff do?" and he gestured at her equipment.

She told him distractedly, not noticing the way that his eyes lit up at her words. She was relieved when he excused himself and vanished with impressively ninja-like silence and speed; she would have been very cross to know that as soon as he was out of earshot, he took out his cell phone, called Doc's office, and told Doc exactly what Ann was doing.

* * *

The second ghost was considerably tougher. And larger. It seemed to make the earth boil around it as it moved, and more than once she'd considered just closing the circle and letting it go. But its very size was tempting; if she could just get this one, she'd have enough to feed Ghost for a month.

And considering some of the deformed shapes it had assumed, and what those shapes had done to each other as it oozed after her, getting this ghost out of here would be a real improvement to the neighborhood.

She'd had to pretend to be injured to get this one close, but finally it slid after her limping, tottering steps into the circle. She stepped and grabbed and lashed out with the aerial, and in an instant the battle was joined.

This one did NOT want to be drained; it bubbled and stretched and made hideous faces at her. But she was on top of it, moving the aerial to counter its lunges. She could hear her equipment humming, but no alarm bells were going off. She leaned back, further, further – and bumped into someone. Doctor McNinja. Amazing how kinesthetic it was touching him; she could tell just from the brush of his body, the sort of springy electricity that ran through his muscles, who it was.

"Are you doing it? Are you doing it?" he panted in her ear. He must have run all the way here.

"Just a moment," she strained, muscles locking, and the ghost finally gave up the last of its ectoplasm and flashed into invisibility. She raised the aerial and shook it, but nothing came drifting out, and the white LED in the grip remained dark. Oh, great. Just what she needed.

She was going to turn and ask Doc to back off and let her finish the process, but he spoiled that by grabbing her around the waist and swinging her high. And he squealed while he did it, like an excited child who has just gotten the greatest present in the world.

"You're a ghostbuster," he half-shouted. "A real ghostbuster, right here, I couldn't believe it when Gordito told me-"

She saw the cables from her gloves swinging free in the air. She looked at the aerial and felt it twist just a little in her hand. "Doctor, you have to-"

"A real, live ghostbuster!" he exclaimed, and squeezed her harder. Which was nice, but right now she needed him to-

"Put me down NOW! The ghost is STILL HERE and I'm," she was dropped and Doc vanished, "not grounded."

Gordito had shown up in the circle as well, and was staring at her. Doc suddenly popped up from behind his shoulder, and she had to suppress a giggle. He shouldn't be able to hide behind Gordito like that – the boy was much smaller – and it was very strange to see him do it.

"Thank you," she said, carefully lowering her arms until the copper cables hanging from her gloves were definitely on the ground. She took the aerial in a double-handed grip and started to shake it, very lightly, feeling the queasy non-weight of the ghost ooze inside it.

"What are you doing?" Gordito asked.

"If you drain a ghost of its ectoplasm, usually – usually – it just vanishes. Goes on to its original destination. But sometimes," she carefully unscrewed the heavy copper nut from the bottom of the aerial handle, "sometimes, there's a ghost that's perfectly balanced. And it doesn't know where to go."

She shook the hollow handle over her palm, and a small grey pearl rolled out. Not quite a pearl, though, because it had two spots, one black and one white, that moved in parallel like eyes. Which they probably were.

"So, little one," she said to the pearl, softly. "Up or down?" She could sense Doc and Gordito leaning close to watch, but all her attention as on the tiny shred of a ghost still remaining in her hand.

The pearl wobbled, and its eyespots rolled back and forth. Then it extruded a single whisker-fine strand of itself, and pointed. Up.

"All right then, all right," she said soothingly. She held her hand up to her face, held her palm at an angle, and blew. And the little ghost-pearl soared away from her, through the clearing like a soap bubble, then soaring, upwards, into the sky – and gone.

"Good luck," she breathed after it, waving with her free hand. Then she went to one knee, checking her collection jars – full, all of them, even the overflow bin was full. She was definitely done for the day.

When she stood, Gordito was looking at her with an odd expression. "So – what happens if you don't, well, send the ghost off like that?"

"Oh, it would just hang around, assimilate more ectoplasm, and then get into more mischief once it was big enough," she said, starting to break down her equipment. "Just purging the ectoplasm doesn't do anything but make a big splash."

"Ha!" Gordito said, but he was looking at Doc. She looked at Doc as well, and found that he was looking quite adorably abashed.

"Come on, Doctor," she said, chucking him under the chin. "I'm not from this planet, and even I know that."

Gordito's mouth fell open. "You're not from this planet?"

She glared at Doc, who looked abashed again. "You said you would tell him!"

"I was going to!" he defended himself.

"Eventually," she said flatly.

"No, soon! Any day now! In fact, I would definitely have told him today."

Gordito and Ann both looked at him.

"Absolutely," he added.

Gordito and Ann arched their eyebrows in unison.

"Really!"


	18. Dr. McNinja's Final Thoughts

Well, I think these events make it clear that the charity and compassion are a truly universal language! That the urge to help another living being in trouble is something that we share with all life, across the cosmos.

Of course…it seems that kissing is also a universal language.


End file.
